Webcam view to north from campus a bit before 7:00 pm MST yesterday. Nice little pileus above distant tower. Building tower over western Catalinas is quite sheared toward northeast. This reflects the strange wind profile (still present this morning) with strongest winds in lowest third of cloud bearing layer and weak winds above that.
By 8:30 pm (composite radar below from that time) large storms had developed on south flanks of Catalinas and also along and south of I-10. The lightning show was quite spectacular, with nearly continuous flashes from around 8:00 to 10:00 pm. The lightning remarks from the raw observations at TUS were quite inadequate, given the flashes going on. The remarks LTG DSNT ALQDS were essentially carried all through the event even though thunderstorms were being reported at the airport - just another aspect of the sorry state of automated weather observations, especially at second tier airports such as Tucson.
Plot of detected CG flashes (above, from Atmo and Vaisala) is for 24-hours ending at 1:00 am early this morning. There is one cluster of flashes right over airport, although much of metro was in donut hole again, as storms hugged mountain slopes and re-developed south. The ALERT station plot below indicates heaviest rain amounts over Catalinas and eastern edge of metro area. Central and northwest metro area was skunked again re rainfall, all the way out to Pinal County. Only a Trace her,e although we had a long period of thunder and outflows, along with the lightning show. Airport had 0.21" and Atmo 0.13".
This morning's skew-T plot for TWC continues little changed - PW up to 1.75 inches now with considerable CAPE. The wind profile features strongest northeast to east-southeast winds below 500 mb, with very light winds from there up to 150 mb. There has been low-level cooling and considerable heating needed again to get storms going. The 06 UTC runs of WRF models at Atmo both forecast fairly widespread and strong storms again today over much of Pima and Santa Cruz Counties. The NAM version seems more realistic to me (but I've not had much luck past week picking the better model's forecasts), since it does not initiate storms until around 6:00 pm. The GFS version has significant storms underway by around 2:00 pm or so. Rain in our gauge tomorrow morning? Hopefully, since this July seems likely to close out as very dry here at house.
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