Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Interesting Morning At Yuma


Hurricane Paul fell apart last evening as quickly as it intensified to a brief Cat.3 status. The expected push of low-level, high dewpoint air into southwest Arizona occurred early this morning. The GoC surge came in on strong winds and reduced visibility. The Yuma observations carried visibility as low as 3/4 of a mile due to "blowing mist." The Yuma time-series of T and Td above illustrates the big jump in dewpoint temperature. The KYUX Doppler radar VAD (below) indicates that the surge is quite shallow, so that there is little threat of storms developing this afternoon. The early WRF-GFS does forecast isolated showers tomorrow afternoon (Thursday, October 18th) along the Borderlands from Nogales westward.


The shallow marine layer that blew ashore is apparently trapping the KYUX, first-tilt, radar beam and there's a large area of "echo" detected by the radar - see below. Some of this is ground clutter, but some of it may be due to dust and sand and etc., due to the gusty winds. The very strong echo to the northwest is apparently the San Bernardino Mountains, northwest of Palm Springs, California. This an unusual and interesting situation, not seen very often.


No comments:

Post a Comment