The GPS PW has been trending slowly downward for the past 5 days (above is time-series at campus site ending this morning), and thunderstorm activity diminished greatly yesterday - below is 4:00 pm MST visible image from yesterday afternoon. My hope for a storm drifting south off the Catalinas was extremely wishful thinking.
Here are two plots of CG flashes for 24-hour periods ending at midnight (from Vaisala and Atmo). Top is for yesterday and bottom is for Thursday. My eyeball estimate is that flashes decreased by about an order of magnitude, which is some change. Yesterday evenings sounding from TWC had no CAPE.
I took a look at both the 00 UTC and 06 UTC forecasts from the WRF-NAM and both runs of the model continue to forecast a considerable increase in storms for this afternoon. Panels above and below are for accumulated rainfall through midnight tonight, with top being from 00 UTC run. The earlier run had more activity over eastern Pima County than did the midnight run.
The morning sounding continues dismal with almost no winds aloft through most of the troposphere and only a sliver of afternoon CAPE. If the forecast increases in storms are to occur, we'll need some increase in PW from the west to northwest (where values are a bit higher) and perhaps some mid-level cooling. Will have to watch the morning forecasts and PW trends and nearby mountains for for midday buildups.
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