Storm Update This Morning 30 December 2010

The observations I'm reporting here were mostly from 7 am this morning. The cold part of storm started around 6 am here at house, with a line of moderate showers that were located along the front (NWS Tucson radar is down this morning). The top two figures show RAP and NAM 500 mb analyses for 12 UTC this morning. Most noteworthy are the temperatures near -40C in the northern Great Basin where the tropopause is right around 500 mb. The road up Mt. Lemmon was closed at 5 pm last evening - about the time of the photos shown in previous post.
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Precipitation Reports
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Jim Means reported 1.25" of rain yesterday at Alpine, California.
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The bottom figure is from the NWS webpage and is a graphic showing rain measurements across the Tucson metro area for period ending at midnight last night.
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Here at house rain gauge held 0.42" at 7 am, which was from both the warmer event and the first rainband attending the cold front. Atmo had 0.20" at midnight and an additional 0.06" at 7 am - thus, the WRF QPF was quite good from yesterday, but just a touch too dry at low elevations.
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ALERT Network: 100% coverage at 7 am with 19 gauges having 0.50" or more at 7 am - three of these were in Marana and rest were in the Catalina Foothills and Redington Pass, where one gauge measured just over an inch.
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RAWS gauges in Pima and Santa Cruz Counties: Sells rain gauge has been out of service for months and Sollers has been off line for a couple of years. Rincon and Hopkins had snow only events, which gauges can not measure. Empire had 0.28"; Sasabe had .34; and Saguaro had 0.57".
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So, December's third precipitation event here in the metro area is still underway - really quite good for an el nina winter!