Very nice lighting highlights just after sunrise this morning - above image from 7:00 am MST. As I walked I could see rotor clouds just downwind of Mt. Hopkins to the south. So I checked the RAWS site observations down there and found that the max gusts during last 24-hours was 88 mph, just a bit after midnight early this morning. This is the highest gust speed at Mt. Hopkins that I can recall. The exposed location of this RAWS station is downwind and just slightly south of Mt. Wrightson during easterly winds. Apparently a standing wave from Wrightson surfaces at Hopkins sometimes.
In the longer term, the ECMWF forecasts a very significant plunge of arctic air into much of the U.S. early next week. The surface forecast below is valid at 00 UTC on November 12th. Although the cold front has reached nearly to the Gulf of Mexico at this forecast time, the center of the high pressure is still up in Canada with SLPs of a bit over 1048 mb. I am sure that the media will be dusting off their "polar vortex" hype from last winter as this event unfolds.
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