Dry-Out From East?

Note re Irma - NHC has upgraded the hurricane to Cat. 5 this morning, based on recon flights in the storm.

Afraid that I was distracted by Irma yesterday and took my eye off our backyard. Marginal CAPE at low elevations kept the big storm over the Catalinas - as main core stayed better CAPE and secondary piece went down the Rincons. Couple of the WRF runs showed this evolution quite nicely. View from campus a bit before 6:00 pm MST - above - indicates some light rain along foothills. Here at house we had thunder, gusts to around 30 mph, and 0.01" of light shower that wasn't enough to wet ground more than an hour.

Plot of detected CG flashes below (from Atmo and Vaisala) shows the mountain-anchored storm well. Thunderstorm activity along the Rim country stayed north of Phoenix metro area.

Alert stations with 0.04" or more kept to the mountains, with nearly a complete strike-out at lower-elevations - so it goes.

Below is 06 UTC WRF-GFS forecast for mixing ratio valid at 6:00 pm this evening - very grim forecast as model brings the dry air back in from the east. Think the model has been a bit aggressive with the drying from east, so I'll keep an eye on the GPS PW time series at Atmo page today.