Saturday, March 17, 2018

Back from Road Trip


We have been away this past week on a road trip to northern New Mexico. The main weather word for the trip was "wind" and I'll cover that in a later post. View above is of the sparsely snow-covered southern end of the Sangre de Cristo mountains (looking north-northwestward from Pecos, New Mexico). Significant drought continues over much of the Southwest and Spring snow cover in the mountains is well below normal.

This weekend another short wave at 500 mb will be crossing the Southwest - below are four panels from the GEFS run at 00 UTC last evening showing the forecast of this feature over Arizona at 12 UTC tomorrow morning (Sunday).



The 06 UTC GEFS QPF plumes for TUS (above) indicate a slight chance for light showers with this system tomorrow morning, and perhaps another system on the horizon at the end of next week. The plumes for PW (below) show the current system to be quite starved for moisture, while the models try to pick up a Pacific moisture plume in the forecasts for the end of the week.

At the bottom is the 06 UTC WRF-GFS forecast from Atmo - shown is that model's dismal forecast for precipitation through 06 pm MST tomorrow for southern Arizona, with the weekend precipitation confined to higher elevations of north and east Arizona.





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