As was well advertised by both the short and long-range models, a strong storm pushed across Arizona yesterday and during the night. There is some snow lingering in the far southeast portions of the state. The subtropical moisture plume mentioned in Sunday's post did come across southern Arizona briefly (mainly as high and middle clouds with some virga, mammatus, and sprinkles - trace here at house midday yesterday) but was shunted east and south before the strong PVA moved into southern Arizona. The storm blew into the Tucson area yesterday afternoon with gusty winds and plenty of blowing dust, as shown above.
Highlights from the observations this morning:
It is difficult to assess the Pima County ALERT gauges this morning since higher elevation sites experienced a snow event and those gauges are registering "0". It does appear that the coverage was nearly a 100%, although a couple of sites in the far west part of the network might have stayed dry. Amounts ranged from around a 1/10" to a bit more than 1/2" - once again well-predicted by the models. Here at the house we had 0.32" and atmo had 0.51". Winds gusted at most southern Arizona stations to around 40 to 50 mph, not nearly as strong as with the event of December 7/8. I did note that Gutherie recorded 64 mph, Horse Camp Canyon had winds to 72 mph, and the atmo anemometer (75 ft above ground level) had several gusts around 65 mph.
Other observations of interest: snow occurred this early morning at Nogales, Ft. Huachuca, and Douglas, and during the night at Kingman. Phoenix and Scotssdale reported thunderstorms yesterday afternoon, and Prescott had thunder with snow. The models continue to predict that this S/W will will produce a blizzard-like storm for parts of the central and northern Plains on Christmas day.
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