Showers And Heavy Clouds This Morning

Have to leave shortly to pick my son up at airport - so just a brief look at our interesting situation. Heavy middle clouds cover most of southern Arizona this morning (as per view from campus above) and they produced a few light sprinkles during early morning hours - hard to tell if we had a Trace here, but there were some widely spaced drop splats in the dust along Allen, just north of here. Current radar indicates sprinkles and a few showers across the metro area.

The 06 UTC WRF-GFS runs appear to have captured the cloudiness quite well, and I'll take a look at a few forecasts from that model run at Atmo. Forecast above is OLR at 8:00 am MST this morning - while second below is same forecast but for 3:00 pm this afternoon. Model forecasts little solar heating for the day - which is quite warm already (82 F at 6:30 am here at house).

Immediately below is the forecast skewT for TWC valid at 3:00 pm this afternoon. The sounding has PW over an inch, but lowest levels continue somewhat dry. While the forecast indicates mixed layer CAPE of only a bit over 250 J/Kg. The sounding is not very exciting, unless some clearing and heating happens during mid-day.

But, the model's forecasts for tomorrow are actually much more interesting. The low-level remnants of Bud head off toward southwest New Mexico, while Arizona is mostly affected by the 500 mb trough coming in from the west. The 500 mb WRF-GFS forecast above is valid at 5:00 pm tomorrow afternoon, and indicates a nice area of cold temperatures over southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico.

The forecast SkewT for TWC below is valid at 5:00 pm tomorrow (the 16th) and has mixed layer CAPE over 1,000 J/Kg, as well as a much stronger vertical wind profile (similar to a Fall transition pattern and indeed this Bud burst of moisture vanishes quickly during late day tomorrow) - but, perhaps some nasty thunderstorms around tomorrow afternoon, before the serious dry-out?