7/21 Wednesday 12:50 pm
Storms fired early yesterday. They were more frequent in the higher terrain, most were north of highway 160. Just a couple formed in the southern portion of the forecast area.
The last time the NWS issued a flood watch for our area, rain totals were not particularly impressive. Today’s flash flood watch is for areas above 8,800 feet. I am going to leave it at that. Last time I talked about it too much and ended up disappointed. So I am going to ignore it for now. I hope we don’t encounter the dreaded FWJ (flood watch jinx).
Today, we once again have a great setup. All of the ingredients are in place. The CAPE is, for us, off the charts. These values are higher than I have seen in a long time. They persist this evening and through the night.
Here they are from noon today through 6 am Thursday.
This update is a little later than usual because all of the overnight models were indicating a later start to the action today, so I decided to take some extra time and post after all of the new data came out.
I am glad I waited because the models are delaying the deeper push of monsoonal moisture until Thursday and Friday. They are relying upon convective showers today to get the ball rolling. Yesterday, I mentioned that Tuesday and early Wednesday would be transition days into the deeper push of moisture. From what I am seeing the transition time will extend into this evening. This does not mean it won’t rain, it just means the showers will be triggered by convection rather than the monsoonal tap.
Yesterday, I posted the projected precipitation totals for this event ending Monday morning.
Both the GFS and Euro trended up slightly overnight for the same time period. I still think the Euro may be too low.
Euro
I like the consistency I have seen from the German model below.
Here is the GFS. This summer the GFS and the Euro have both underdone precipitation amounts in the lower elevation areas. Interestingly enough, the GFS is pretty excited about the totals in the lower and middle elevation areas. In the highest elevations, the GFS is showing 3 to 4 inches of rain through Monday morning.
GFS
Next update Thursday, thanks for following and supporting the site!