Monday, January 16, 2017

Event Summary And Week Ahead


The weekend event is mostly over, although there could still be some sprinkles today. Rainfall (and snow) was most significant over the northeast half of the ALERT network, with amounts near and over an inch common. The plot above covers the entire event through 06:00 am MST this morning. The plot below (from weather.graphics and Vaisala) shows CG flash density for the past 48-hours - quite a bit of thunderstorm activity over parts of Arizona and much more so to our east. There was thunder here at the house Saturday afternoon but most of the rain here (0.90" - this was the most rainfall here for an event since that of August 9th, so it was very welcome) fell Saturday night and during the day yesterday. Airport reported 0.57" for this event.



The large-scale pattern remains very unsettled with several fast-moving short waves forecast to impact the Southwest from mid-week through the coming weekend. The forecast above (from the 00 UTC WRF-GFS on 5.4 km grid) is for 500 mb and is valid at 05:00 am on Saturday the 21st. Note the very cold temperatures over Arizona. Below is the forecast from the same run for total precipitation (on the 1.8 km grid) through midnight next Saturday night. The very long-range global forecasts zeroed in on this big change beginning a couple of weeks out - quite amazing to this old dinosaur forecaster.


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