As forecast, storms returned to eastern Pima County yesterday afternoon. The above web can image from campus at 2:30 pm shows a storm building over the Catalinas. This storm produced heavy rains in the Oracle area. Other storms developed on higher terrain to the south of Tucson and mostly hugged the higher terrain, leaving just debris and anvil rains over most of metro area. Here at the house we had thunder and a total afternoon rain of only 0.08" (this added to the 0.01" which had fallen in the early morning). Most rain nearby was 1.97" in Florida Canyon in the northeast Santa Rita Mountains.
At 500 mb (below is NAM analysis at 12 UTC), the closed low over northern Baja has opened to the northwest into the short wave over central California. The Baja piece of the merged short wave will move northeastward across Arizona today.
All the models forecast a significant weather event today (note that PW across southern Arizona ranges from around 1.5" to 2.25" at Yuma). What I've done is to pick up the 24-hour forecasts from the models' forecasts at 06 UTC last night. So, all three of these rainfall predictions show the model forecast total through midnight tonight (11 September 2012). Above is the high-resolution, early WRF-GFS from Atmo, while immediately below is the NWS GFS forecast and at the bottom is the NWS NAM forecast. Note that the WRF and the NAM have heavier rains over southeast Arizona. Should be an interesting day. Some washes will probably be flowing well into the night and caution is advised.
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