A quick summary this morning. Storms moved across parts of the Tucson metro area yesterday afternoon from around 2:00 to 4:30 pm. Above is view north from campus at 3 pm MST and below is regional radar at 3 pm from NCAR. There were strong winds at spots and some hail reports - quite something given the mediocre morning sounding yesterday. The WRF models did a quite good job of forecasting the event.
Here at the house we had a very nasty lightning storm, with wind and dust and little rain. This was followed by a second cell that devloped just to the east with heavy rains and more gusty winds. I estimate 40 to 50+ mph several different times, and I was worried about some of our trees. By the time it ended here we'd had 0.66" of rain. I drove off to Campbell and Glenn on an errand after the storms had moved to the west, and there was signifcant flooding running very deeply down several of the streets in this part of town, and I had to detour several times to get where I was going.
---------------------------------------
The ALERT network data shows that 44 of 93 sites had rain in past 24-hours. Seven sites had more than half an inch and Mt. Lemmon reported 1.26" - so a stronger event than anticipated yesterday.
----------------------------------------
Things of note this morning: large and somewhat amorphous middle and upper-level low is centered over Sonora; Very cool middle level temperatures remain in place at 500 mb along the Borderlands with -12C common; Sounding has less PW this morning and very little CAPE - plus there has been substantial near-surface cooling (upper 50s F this morning here at house). So, I expect a much less active day. The early Atmo WRF-GFS forecasts some storms this afternoon, but keeps them totally confined to Santa Cruz County.
------------------------------------------
Finally, this morning's forecasts for Hilary have shifted substantially to the west, so that it remains very unclear what her evential impacts in the West might be.
No comments:
Post a Comment