Many interesting weather features to discuss this morning. There were considerably more thunderstorms across Arizona the past 24-hours than the model forecasts had indicated yesterday morning. The CG flash plots above (ending at 11 pm MST last night) and below (ending at 5 am this morning) show that storms were focused in Sonora and along the Borderlands into central and western Pima County during the afternoon and evening. But, during the late night and early morning hours the thunderstorm activity shifted into west and northwest Arizona. More widespread CAPE obviously developed than I had anticipated.
The fact that the upper-air soundings ended again over much of western Mexico (as abruptly as they appeared last week) seems to have had significant impact on the analyses and forecasts yesterday. The 00 UTC sounding above from TWC on campus last evening indicates that mid-levels had cooled 2-3 C. This seems to have occurred as a 500 mb short wave moved north out of the data void area.
The 500 mb analysis below (I've only drawn streamlines and the -8 C isotherm) indicates that the culprit short wave lies W-E across west-central Arizona this morning. It is certainly problematic that the northwestern Mexican soundings are so unreliable ( for several years now) and that our NWS can't interact with the Mexican Weather Service to insure that soundings are taken routinely at the problem stations.
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