Friday, September 17, 2021

Chance For Light Sprinkles



Heavy, middle level cloud cover over the region this morning as per above view from campus.

Visible satellite image (above from 8:30 am MST) shows several areas of cloudiness from southern California to northern Mexico. At 500 mb (below) there is a weak, short wave over northwestern Sonora moving northward that is apparently associated with two of the cloud areas.


The morning sounding from TUS/TWC (above, from SPC) shows a bit of CAPE, but it is based on a shallow surface layer lifted being lifted to near 600 mb - a not very realistic forecast.

 Sounding may support some light showers from near saturated layer but I would not expect thunderstorms. However, the plot of detected CG flashes (below, from Atmo and Vaisala) shows there have been storms with the short wave to our south, indicating that there is a region with better CAPE. How far north might this air reach?

My forecast would be that there may be isolated thunderstorms to our south and west, but would very surprised to hear thunder here. Second below is the 12 UTC WRF-RR forecast for rainfall from now until midnight tonight - not much with the short wave according to the model's forecast.


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