Looking at satellite trends and station data, the lowest pressures are on the east side of the gulf of california...still think this one will be heading along the same direction as it is now and enter into the southern gulf and possibly up to Los Mochis area before landfall.
Pat called this one very well! Current visible loops seem to indicate that what's left of Hurricane John is making landfall now south of Guaymas. Obviously the GFDL model was far superior to the other models, and the consensus track has been consistently wrong. It is still possible that an orphan low-level circulation will jump Baja and drift out into the Pacific. But it appears that the main moisture and mid-level vorticity from John is heading across far southeast Arizona and into New Mexico.
CORRECTION TO ABOVE at 3:30 pm Labor Day - the circulation that appeared to go ashore in imagery yesterday wasn't the remnants of John. Imagery today indictes that John continues to be nearly stationary over the northern Gulf of California.
I've emphasized for several blog posts that when a TS comes directly into the Gulf the situation is much more complex than when a TS moves northwestward across the region southwest of Baja tip. This has certainly proved to be the case with John.
As for the backdoor front, the GFS model did very well (beginning last Tuesday or so) in forecasting this feature to broach the divide and come into southern Arizona. We were in the southeastern Arizona grasslands near Sonoita Friday afternoon and Saturday. By sunrise on Saturday (yesterday) the front had passed and we experienced a cool, suppressed day down there with brisk east winds. A careful look at the surface observations (and 24-h changes - an essential aspect of surface analysis in the Southwest during summer!) indicates that the front passed Tucson around 5 to 6 am yesterday morning; Casa Grande around 10 to 11 am; and Skyharbor in Phoenix between noon and 1 pm. High temperaturs yesterday east of Phoenix to Sells line were 5 to 10 F cooler than on Friday. The front appeared to stall from around Sells northward to west of Phoenix, providing a nice convergence zone that helped the development of the large MCS that occurred over south-central Arizona late yesterday afternoon and evening. This system produced a huge outflow of cool air that pushed southwest past Yuma and which came uphill across Tucson around 10:30 pm, with a shift to north-northwest winds and a jump in the dewpoint temperatures.
Storms today and tomorrow will occur where there's enough low-level heat, combined with moisture from John, to produce CAPE - mid-level temps are cooler over the north and west parts of the state, but deeper moisture is present over the south-central and southeast regions. Depending on exactly how remnants of John wander around, the models (which still have vastly different forecast scenarios) indicate that a dry-out may occur by Tuesday. Interestingly, the NAM spins another tropical system up southwest of Baja by 84 hours.
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