It's a nice morning with brisk easterly breezes along the Rillito. View above shows Baboquivari off to south of Kitt Peak. There were some towers bubbling at sunrise and a couple of Cbs off to south-southwest of Tucson. The radar a bit before sunrise is shown below. This is about as good as it got during past 18 hours, so essentially all forecasts for southern Arizona were overdone yesterday.
I thought that the early WRF-GFS from Atmo had the right idea with storms late. But they didn't materialize. Strong east winds persisted and a nasty warm layer developed between 300 to 500 mb. It also appears that the inverted trough trough mentioned yesterday was further west than morning observations seemed to indicate - so the NAM initialization wasn't as bad as I thought. Definitely a tough day!
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Regarding previous post, Mike Leuthold comments: ... plus, what would of a special sounding been able to tell you if the moisture profile was bad? It would of been just another bad sounding to make you more mad!
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I think that there are several issues worth mentioning here - the first is that the 1200 UTC sounding was badly contaminated and not at all representative of the larger-scale environment that would affect southeast Arizona during the afternoon. So, my pitch is that any sounding data, once the large, deep mass of clouds had moved away, could have been of some use - e.g., wrt the east winds or warm layer. Second, the RRS humidity data, when too dry, are at their worst around max heating time, so there is usually something to rant about with the 0000 UTC sounding here. However, I will note that the new sondes provide apparently excellent wind data and the temperatures seem reliable, except when the sensor or internal electronics are wetted by cloud or precipitation. Would an early afternoon sounding have helped clarify the forecast situation for rest of the day? - perhaps, but we'll never know the answer.
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