More Storm follow Up

There was much serious flooding around Tucson yesterday afternoon, along with hail, and damaging winds that took down quite a few power poles northwest of here. I title the above photo - "High water - not to worry I'm in a BIG truck!" (photo by Benjie Sanders, Arizona Daily Star). After the storm, the sun peeked out for a bit, as per sunshine shot below.

As per previous post, my take on the events in the afternoon is that two strong outflows converged over the Tucson metro area - one from the south and one from the west - forcing the intense storms over much of the city. Across the ALERT network 83 of 93 stations had rainfall (only the far south and southwest sites had none), with 14 stations measuring more than an inch of rain. Here at the house the total was 1.57" - this is the biggest single storm event since August 13th, 2008 (that storm produced 2.32" here). Jim Toth (who is 1 mile north of River about halfway between Campbell and 1st) reported 3.26" and 1/4 to 1/2 inch hail. He was very near the core of the damage and flooding.

What about today? The PW remains at about 1.5 inches with a gradient out to the west, where values decrease to around an inch. The drier air is being pushed eastward by a weak short-wave that has swung inland around the stationary trough along the west coast. We are essentially in baroclinic, westerly flow today, throughout dept of the troposphere. Quite a difference from the last several days. The early WRF-GFS forecast of the Tucson sounding at 3 pm MST this afternoon is shown above. While the winds are westerly, the air mass remains fairly unstable. Below is total rainfall predicted by the WRF-GFS through midnight - model forecast tries for another day with storms in the metro area. The details will depend upon how quickly drier air moves in, and also whether storms develop again to the west and southwest of Tucson. Storms over the higher mountains today will move away from Tucson.

The early WRF-GFS forecast shuts the storm activity down across southeast Arizona during the next two afternoons. However, the trough stalls and then is pushed back to the west by an inverted, middle and upper-level, trough that is over Texas currently. Hurricane Fabio is also a player, as it is now moving northward. Even though it is well west of Baja, it appears to be associated with very moist air moving northward on both sides of Baja. So, lots to keep an eye on this week.