When it rains in desert people sometimes lose their grip on reality (photo by Mike Christy, Arizona Daily Star).
Graphics here show 24-hour precipitation amounts across the ALERT network (for sectors covering the Catalinas, Rincons, and metro Tucson) at 7 am MST this morning. Coverage over eastern Pima County was 100%, but with a large range in amounts, as the figures illustrate. If there was snow, it was at the highest elevations of the Catalinas and Rincons. The highest rainfall measurement was just over two inches at the Mt. Lemmon ALERT station. One site southeast of here indicates only 0.04". If that's a good measurement, then gradients were over 2 inches across a fairly short distance. Here at the house we got 0.41", thanks to several fast moving, moderate showers that seemed to develop just upstream on the Tucson Mountains and then come right across our location. Art Rangno out in Catalina reports about 2/3rds of an inch. This has been yet another event where the skill and accuracy of the model predictions was very impressive, out to and just beyond 7 days!
Also a damp and frosty morning here at house with the temperature a couple of degrees below freezing - too early though to know exactly the low will come in at.
The details of the global models (at least ECMWF and GFS) are considerably different in our area, but both models forecast another event in the Wednesday/Thursday time frame and then another around next weekend. I note that the GFS ensemble members all seem to forecast precipitation over southeast Arizona for Wed/Thur, and the current NWS for the airport reflects this with 50% POPs Wednesday and 60% Wednesday night.
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