Brief summary yesterday through this morning: Top image shows radar depiction of the one nice storm that developed yesterday out to the far southwest of Tucson, just along and south of the border. At dusk, here at the house, considerable middle cloudiness and some ACC drifted in from the south, and low-level moisture has been on the increase through the night, even though winds below 500 mb have been quite light. PW has reached to near 40 mm across low-elevation areas. At sunrise this morning there was a considerable mass of middle cloudiness (see middle image), with buildups, covering south-central Arizona. The buildups were not deep, but made for a much different visual start to the day compared to yesterday. The main dilemma for today concerns the situation at and around 500 mb and how it will evolve. The morning 500 mb chart (bottom image from NCAR RAP) indicates that the tail of the strong short-wave trough over Wyoming and Colorado has pushed across most of Arizona and is positioned between Phoenix and Tucson. Temperatures at and above 500 mb are fairly warm, hindering CAPE and keeping the morning buildups low-topped. A simple extrapolation of the 500 mb situation would lead one to expect that the shortwave would continue to drag across the rest of Arizona, leaving fiarly pronounced anticyclonic flow aloft over the low-level moisture. However, the models have other ideas, as per next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment