It’s been a while since my last blog, but I’m back from my summer vacation in Seattle, and I’m ready to get blogging!

Monday was my first storm chase of Monsoon Season 2017 and also my first chase south of Tucson (crazy, I know). The chase was tiring and frustrating, but I should have expected that considering it was a tricky storm environment from the beginning. The forecasts showed potential for strong storms in three separate areas: 1. Tucson/Coronado Nat. Forest,  2. Central Pima County/Mex/US border and 3. Eastern AZ/Safford-Clifton.

Mike Leuthold of the University of Arizona wrote about the storm potential on his weather model discussion blog.

The potential is there for Tucson, but the mixed layer remains shallow and will need some mesoscale lift to realize convection.  Outflows, while locally strong, are not strong enough once they reach Tucson as the PBL heights don’t support very strong winds.  Storms also aren’t moving that much due to the light and variable winds between 400 – 600mb.  A wasted opportunity!

In English: The ingredients for strong storms were present: moisture, clear skies and pent-up energy (instability) in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, a layer of warm air overtop cooler air capped storm growth and required an extra shove to trigger storms. Gentle winds in the upper atmosphere meant that the storms that did pop up would be almost stationary.

I drove south from Phoenix and struggled between two targets: Tucson which was much further and unknown to me, and Pima County which I have chased before.

At this point, I should have committed to going to Tucson (Target 2) in order to intercept storms that were getting an extra shove from the mountains. Instead, I got distracted by the pop-up storm in Pima County (Target 1). The detour wasted 30 minutes that placed me out of position and racing to a towering storm over Benson, AZ. If I hadn’t taken that detour I would have arrived right on time.

Once I finally reached the Benson Storm in Target 2, lightning was sporadic and the storms were dying, but nature did not disappoint. A sunset filtered by the smoky Burro Fire cast a beautiful golden and pinkish light on the storms as they fell apart.

I managed to get one decent shot of lightning before the sun went down – notice the beautiful pink hue as the sunset hit the tops of the clouds.

My second mistake was calling it quits too early. As I started going north, a storm formed to the south and started landing huge CG (cloud-to-ground) lightning bolts. If I had lingered south longer, I would have caught some closer strikes. Here’s one shot of the distant lightning.

Overall, it was an exciting adventure and I have much to improve on this summer!