Finally there was a somewhat decent rain event across southeast Arizona. All reporting stations and also RAWS sites in Pima, Santa Cruz, and Cochise Counties reported measurable rain with the exception of Douglas. Rainfall was also measured at 72 of the 93 Pima County ALERT gauges. So there was a quite high coverage of rainfall. Much greater coverage than I would have predicted (given the very weak wind fields present yesterday below 400 mb) and much greater than forecast officially. Nine stations in the Alert network reported a half inch or more - these were foothills and mountain stations, with the maximum amount being 0.91" at Empire Peak. The storms moved into town from the north, see above Computer Science web cam photo looking north at 6 pm. We had thunder, mostly in-cloud lightning and 0.24" of rain here at the house. Looks like, in addition to good mountain CAPE and some low-elevation CAPE, an upper-level jet nosed in from the Pacific to help provide a bit of large-scale vertical motion. There was perhaps a weak inverted trough across southeast Arizona but this feature was fairly stagnant - the sounding from Tucson was missing last evening so there's little hard observational data to examine.
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