My lovely wife and I are back home now from our medical diversion to Stanford, and everything is OK. Looks like this was the last time surgery was needed. Thanks for all the well-wishes and help everyone!
While en-route on Thursday April 7th late afternoon, interesting weather (not climate) occurred as we passed through Fairfield, CA. It is not quite the Bay Area, but pretty darned close with an elevation of only 62 feet. Have a look at this photo:
The photo above is taken by a friend (Jane Locas) also traveling through at the same time. We saw similar scenes, but couldn’t get to the camera while on I-80. We did snap this photo when we pulled off:
It looked and felt like wet snow, and that’s what everyone was calling it we spoke to at the restaurant where we snapped this photo in the parking lot, but I have my doubts. Here’s why.
Have a look at the met obs from Travis AFB, nearby for the time period:
The METAR report doesn’t mention snow, but does mention -TSRA (ThunderStorm and RAin). METAR codes are here. Note also the winds.
There was convective activity in the area, and we did see some mild thunderstorms and some lightning on the trip prior to driving through Fairfield.
When I picked it up and examined it felt exactly like wet snow and had the right texture, it was also very slushy, so melting had occurred. Note the air temp of 43-46F during that time. Note also in the first photo above the “clumpy” pellet like shapes seen through the windshield.
While Al Gore might have been at his bayside condo in downtown SFO contemplating whether the lack of an update for months on sea level at UC will make his purchase look better or worse, I think we can safely rule out the Gore effect and say it was simply a thundersnow weather event precipitating something known as graupel.
Thundersnow formation with an occluded front.
Wikipedia says:
Thundersnow, also known as a winter thunderstorm or a thunder snowstorm, is a relatively rare kind of thunderstorm with snow falling as the primary precipitation instead of rain. It typically falls in regions of strong upward motion within the cold sector of an extratropical cyclone, where the precipitation consists of ice pellets rather than snow. Thermodynamically, it is not different from any other type of thunderstorms but the top of the cumulonimbus are usually quite low.
That pretty well describes the mesoscale phenomena I witnessed while driving that day.
Had I had time and a thermos container, I would have collected a bunch of the graupel took it home, and brewed some Hail Ale, which is a fond memory from long ago and some stormchasing work I once did.
However, as Mike Lorrey posted on the next day, that storm headed south and caused some real snow in the Los Angeles area.
Snow in Los Angeles County, NWS Winter Advisory
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Welcome back, and glad things went well.
My friend in Vegas has just sent me a very similar picture of it snowing on her car windshield. Did I mention it was Vegas, Nevada? That sort of thing boggles the mind for a Brit. Vegas is supposed to be a sea of neon sitting in a blistering desert.
The photo showing the handful of ‘pellet snow’ is what we used to call ‘corn snow’, where I grew up in Wisconsin. We had local areas of about 1″ of the same, just a few days ago in the Puget Sound region of Washington state.
I’m glad to hear that the medical issues are stabilized and ‘on the mend’!
Welcome back. Here is hoping all medical trials and tribulations are now over. May any test results come out (snow) white.
I am encouraged and elated that the tone of this posting suggests that all is well with the Watts.
Praises and thanks are offered…..
On my trip from Calgary to Wickenburg last November, I experenced accumulations of snow all the way to St George Utah on I-15. Once passing through the little corner of AZ into Nevada, things began drying up.
Judging by the vehicular carnage on the UT section of I-15, I would guess that that white stuff was a sparingly regular event. People seemed genuinely baffled.
…oh, and I’m glad that everything went well at Stanford. Great news.
I am so happy that your wife’s surgery went well.
After your post, the usual “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)” has a link to “The Gore effect – now in the dictionary!”. Thought that would be interesting, except it gives a “404 error (file not found)”.
We had a bit of that large-flake stuff a few days ago here in NJ, too. I think I heard a sort of big- flake-muffled thunderclap, maybe with sympathy for big Al Gore’s latest whimper.
Graupel . Always wondered what you called that stuff ( you see a lot of it in Sun Valley ) . Glad everything is ok .
Trust you are on the mend Anthony and as always an interesting post.
“My lovely wife and I are back home now ..”
Wow.. Just reminds me to go give my wife a biiig hug and kiss.
Snowy La Nina spring: Well, This forecast is still showing a remis between La Nina and El Nino a few months from now:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/images3/nino34SSTMonE120.gif
– but notice the blue (newer) forecasts are indicating that prognosis are slowly moving towards La Nina.
K.R. Frank and all the best!
The white stuff is Donnergraupel. Basically bite-sized Thundersnow.
Anthony, we are so glad your good wife came through the procedure and that all is well, and glad you’re safely home. Now, get to blogging! Just kidding, you deserve a few days off. Of course, if you feel like blogging……..
Anthony.
My best regards to you and Mrs Watts. I hope that this latest bout of CAGW in Fairfield, CA, isn’t causing too much trouble. Does this man, Gore, have no shame?
/sarc/
Enjoy your respective favourite tipples on me.
Many happy thoughts and warm wishes.
Anthony, I have absolutely seen it snow in the low-40s here on the east coast (North Carolina) before. I’ve see sleet all the way up to 55F.
Here in Australia it is sometimes called “sago snow” or just “sago”. Even though we get up to two or three metres of snow each winter in our imaginatively named Snowy Mountains, the big fluffy flakes are not common.
Anthony, I am happy for your good news and hope that you and your wife will enjoy a long stretch now free from the need for having your lives entangled with the medical profession.
As for the snow it’s obviously global warming. The comic strip “Zack Hill” this week has been mocking the linking of global warming with cold and snow. Cheers!
http://comics.com/zack_hill/2011-04-09/
As others have said glad that you and your wife are safe and back home.
The storm has moved east and is hitting us here in North Eastern Arizona. It has been snowing off and on all day. Fortunately it is to warm to stay on the ground but has put a nice white covering on the trees.
Anthony:
Just ran into a neighbor. “Global Warming ‘Believer’…” (Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominos, Kyrie, etc.) He was believing in AWG yesterday, waiting for them to clear the runways at Salt Lake City and deice the plane before flying back to MN.
Funny!
Max
Damn good for aquifer replenishment and ground water storage. Yay!
best wishes for you and your wife.
Something nodd is happening in the world of weather. i have never known an eqarly April this warm in the UK! Yet you have snow in Cal. Something is screwed.
I remember “thundersnow” from back East. In particular there was one storm in Washington DC where we had a Nor’easter and got hammered with snow when little had been forecast. The city was paralyzed. It took me 8 hours to get home from work. A couple of days later we had a squall come through and it started snowing like mad with lightning and thunder. It was actually pretty comical, people began simply abandoning their cars on the Beltway assuming we were going to get another massive blast. We ended up getting only a couple of inches but all those abandoned cars made it a horrible experience. I don’t remember what year it was but it was in the mid to late 1980’s.
Joe, welcome home and hope your tune-up goes for another 100,000+ miles.
Graupel, aka Snow Pellets (SP is the old code) are common here in Colorado, especially in the spring. Last week we had a two-inch thunder snow/pellet storm, while in April 1986 a 7-hour thunderstorm dropped almost two FEET of graupel. It then snowed regular flakes for another two feet.
As a co-op observer, I have to take great care to distinguish between graupel (snow pellets) and hail, since graupel counts as snow and towards the seasonal snow total, while hail does not (it used to in some observing manuals). The difference is subtle, depending on the bouncing characteristics and clarity of the pellet (but there is opaque hail, and wet graupel can be kind of clear). I use the thumbnail test – if I can crush or split the pellet with my (or someone else’s) thumbnail, it’s grapel. If I can’t, it’s solid ice (small hail).
If lightning is too close to feel good about going outside to play with pellets on the ground, one can look at a hail pad (aluminum foil on styrofoam) after the storm moves on. Hail leaves well defined craters on a hail pad while graupel leaves rounded dents.
This is all pretty arcane, but fun stuff for weather observer geeks.