Thunderstorms were widespread across Arizona and northern Mexico yesterday - the CG flash plot above is for 24-hours ending at 11 pm last evening. Very high flash densities occurred with some of the heavy storms in central Pima County and Santa Cruz County. Would be great if I could find hard numbers about the lightning flashes. Severe thunderstorm at Sierra Vista produced gusts to 60 mph and storm at DM AFB produced gusts to 52 mph - Katie said there was a lot of blowing dust in the evening when she headed home from the University.
Across the Pima County ALERT network areal coverage was essentially 100%, with only one site near Vail not recording rainfall. Some amounts were very large - note the high elevation sites in the Catalinas (ALERT plots above and below are for 24-hours ending at 5 am MST this morning, September 5th). The most rain at an ALERT site was 4.65 inches near Arivaca in the far southwest corner of the network (where flash densities were very high). Across the ALERT gauges 20 sites had over half an inch and 6 sites were over an inch. Here at the house we had rumbles of thunder from in-cloud lightning and an hour or so of anvil rain - total ended up at 0.29". The metro/west sector of the ALERT network below highlights the intense rainfall gradient between downtown and the upper-reaches of the Catalinas.
The early runs of the WRF models at Atmo forecast a day with very much diminished storm activity - not surprising given yesterday's widespread event that brought substantial low-level cooling, strong surface pressure rises, and drying aloft. However, as Norbert moves north just west of Baja, mT air makes a strong return for the weekend. Below is WRF-NAM forecast of PW valid at noon on Sunday.
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