The ECMWF 168-hour 500 mb forecast valid at 1200 UTC this morning (Monday, March 19th) is shown above. This morning's 500 mb analysis from NCAR is shown below. The general forecast is quite good, although there are many smaller scale details that were not captured in the forecast. Generally, the ECMWF was about 12-hours too slow. The similar GFS forecast was deeper and further west, and was thus about 24-hours too slow. Regardless, excellent forecasts by the global models out at the 7-day time frame.
Summary of the weather event so far here in Tucson. During the morning yesterday 100% of the ALERT gauges measured precipitation. At 2 pm MST yesterday 25 of the sites had had over half an inch of rain, with one station measuring 1.02". Here at the house we had 0.44", with the rainfall ending about noon, and only a couple of sprinkles since then. At 6 am this morning only 5 more ALERT stations had reached half an inch, indicating that the bulk of the rainfall occurred with the first band of showers. There was quite a bit of convection during afternoon, with some lightning and thunder at spots. Winds were very strong ahead of the band - highest gust I noticed was 74 mph at the Guthrie RAWS site. Here at the house, this was the most rain in 24-hours since December 13th of last year, i.e., in more than three months. Heavy clouds outside now and another vorticity maximum or two still to come by, so perhaps the event will get a second wind.
Low temperature yesterday fell to 38F during the morning rain; the overnight low was 34F - so quite a cold system - again as forecast 7 days ahead by the global models.
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