Monday, July 04, 2011

Summary Of July 3rd 2011

Yesterday certainly did not live up to the storm potential that seemed present in the morning data - tough to have to eat crow at the start of summer! While there was considerable thunderstorm activity with light rains, there was no outbreak of severe storms with damaging winds - except way off to northwest in the Las Vegas area. Here in Arizona the weekend's most severe storm so far has been the microburst storm near Mesa on the afternoon of the 2nd - this storm took out poles and lines - power was just being restored to some yesterday afternoon.
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Closest to severe yesterday were several haboobs and dust storms. Storms did run west to the Colorado River, but they were crossing desolate desert with a population density slightly greater than that around Timbuktu. Several outflows went through the Tucson area. Outflow from the south around 4 pm produced some development over north Tucson and the Catalina foothills. Here at the house we had a shower with big splats of spitting rain, a bit of wind and a bit of dust. Jim Toth reported that he had 1/10" during this shower. Atmo anemometer on the building roof measured several gusts during the outflows of 50 to 54 mph. Later, around 10:30 in the evening storms developed to south, and we had lightning and thunder and 0.01" of rain. The Pima County ALERT data page is down this morning, so no details from there- the RAWS stations nearest Tucson all had measurable but light rainfall. Atmo had 0.31" and DM had .25".  It appears that the main problem yesterday was due to diminished CAPE by evening, but the storms that did get organized definitely had high bases and precipitation was falling into very hot and low RH air near the surface - so I'm surprised there were not some wind reports.


Tucson composite radar image for 4 pm yesterday afternoon - the echoes right over TUS apparently had no cloud-to-ground lightning. However, the storms at 10:30 pm had lots of lightning and thunder.


IR satellite image at 9 pm on the 3rd showing several small MCSs but no large and well-organized system running toward the Colorado.


Haboob yesterday afternoon approaching the La Estrella Mountains west-southwest of Phoenix.


Contrast with the view north from Kitt Peak this morning - in the cloud and showers associated with a sunrise line of Cbs that stretched from near Ft. Huachuca to Gila Bend.

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