Friday, July 29, 2011

Tough Day - Plus Rants About The Bad RRS Soundings


Above graphic is 0115 UTC visible image this afternoon. As expected, southeast Arizona has remained mostly suppressed as a new BL developed. There is one strong storm now, down close to Douglas.


The latest, 0000 UTC, sounding from Tucson (above) shows that the new BL built up to about 750 mb - quite impressive really. But the sounding above indicates NO CAPE above the new BL. So, this provides a good answer to the question of why isn't more happening? But, what can we believe, as we consider what will happen during the next six hours?


The time series plot above for GPS PW versus raob PW indicates that the Tucson RRS 00 UTC data are around 4/10s of an inch too dry. So, is there CAPE drifting around out there, or isn't there? The bad NWS sounding data don't tell us. So, it's a bit of an unknown, and we'll just have to keep watch! A really bad situation, where the miserable sounding data definitely impact our ability to make short-term forecasts! As I wrote this morning - it would have been really nice to get a special sounding from the TUS NWS office today, but no such luck.

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