Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:18:16
Speaker 1
Has it gone under the plane? Maybe there’s a little bit. Just a little. Yeah. It’s surprisingly, you know, one of the things in a southwest Wyoming. Southeast Wyoming. Things of concern is, as any wind gust that it might have that are nasty, picked some trees up some trees and not muck right.

00:00:18:18 – 00:00:42:00
Speaker 2
Well, I think we’ll we’ll go ahead and begin here. So, welcome to this afternoon’s, visit satellite chat. And, for today, we’ll be talking, quite a bit about the recent floods in, Colorado and New Mexico. So this is a, look at the, the stage for precipitation, the rainfall, over a one week period leading up to the 16th.

00:00:42:00 – 00:01:04:03
Speaker 2
And you can see a lot of rain over, Colorado and New Mexico in particular with, the red is, five inches or greater. And then these purples up here are ten inches or greater, and you can see pretty large areas that had, those very high totals. So, first what we’ll do is, lead off looking at some, imagery.

00:01:04:06 – 00:01:28:02
Speaker 2
And then I have some slides to show here and I’ll be really anxious to hear, what happened down there in New Mexico because, we have, a fair, a fairly good perspective of what happened around here, but, we we’re anxious to hear, what happened down in New Mexico as well. So to, to discuss the large scale, set up with this, so to speak.

00:01:28:05 – 00:01:39:25
Speaker 2
We’ll turn it over to, Bernie. Connell here, to her screen. And, we’ll look at the, blended product here, I believe.

00:01:39:27 – 00:01:44:11
Speaker 1
Actually. Dan, where you going? To just show, Scott’s DPW.

00:01:44:13 – 00:01:54:12
Speaker 2
Okay. You want to go to Scott first? Okay, let’s go to Scott. Let’s go to Scott Lindstrom and Madison.

00:01:54:14 – 00:02:27:03
Speaker 1
Okay. I was, I think if I need to, but there we go. Okay. So this is a week, week plus animation of the water vapor imagery from goes West, showing the setup for, for the, rains, where the moisture is coming from, and also showing the end of it as well. After the, pesky upper level low, the entire system finally gets nudged out.

00:02:27:06 – 00:02:49:13
Speaker 1
A couple of things. That of note here, the starts on the fifth. The 5th of September. I guess I’ll leave it down here so you can actually see the times it’s going through the 15th, fifth to the 16th of, September. So, 12 days at the beginning of this animation, you can see the, the remnants of, tropical system.

00:02:49:13 – 00:03:22:26
Speaker 1
Lorena, that comes onshore and that’s the moisture from that is drawn upward into this really nice plume of moisture that you can see, coming up from the tropical Pacific, but also coming up from the tropical, from the Gulf of Mexico. So there there are two areas there, at least two airstreams here that are helping moisture converge, on to the Front Range, both Colorado and New Mexico and also, you can kind of infer from this, there is there’s a there are a series of systems in the northwest flow.

00:03:22:26 – 00:03:38:13
Speaker 1
And if you just imagine a high pressure system up over the Midwest, that’s going to be funneling easterly flow toward the, toward the Front Range of Colorado. I don’t think that I don’t think that easterly flow around those high pressure systems got all the way down to New Mexico. The front didn’t get that far to the south.

00:03:38:13 – 00:04:07:04
Speaker 1
But, you can definitely see moisture, coming in and pulses off the Gulf of Mexico being drawn up, toward the, toward the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, both in Colorado and in, New Mexico. So this is Colorado with Boulder, Boulder County highlighted. I, I also have this for oops, I didn’t get this quite for goes east, but let me just change it and reload it.

00:04:07:06 – 00:04:34:01
Speaker 1
So I have the same thing from the goes east perspective, same kind of time frame. And I like this because you can see a little bit easier the moisture coming in from the Gulf of Mexico and getting, moving toward western Texas and being drawn northward along the Front Range. So, if you look at W you, I’m going to have to go into this blog post.

00:04:34:04 – 00:04:52:29
Speaker 1
I don’t know if I have an animation of this, but this is the percent of normal of TPI w and it’s just a very nice region. Well, nice I guess is a, loaded word here, but a region of 200% of normal that was banked up against the Front Range in Colorado and also over southern New Mexico.

00:04:52:29 – 00:05:17:23
Speaker 1
So. And you can also see the upper level low that was spinning over Nevada had plenty of moisture associated with it. This morning they talked about whether this was an atmospheric river. And the consensus was that it probably wasn’t. You really can’t see an uninterrupted plume, coming out of the tropics, moving over the Mexican, Cordillera and then into the southwest.

00:05:17:23 – 00:05:43:02
Speaker 1
It’s very hard for that kind of, it’s very hard for an atmospheric river like that to cross the topography, the high terrain of, Mexico. So not technically a, not technically an atmospheric river. According to, if that was Sheldon, who is who was talking about that? So they didn’t have that kind of really nice picture of the plume of total precipitable water.

00:05:43:02 – 00:06:08:04
Speaker 1
But if you looked at the amounts of total precipitable water, I believe was a record amount in Denver from, from the 20 founding, on last Tuesday, I think, hey, Scott. Yeah, it’s totally clear. One. Yes, I hear the last one is that, Yeah. So so it would be nice to see the, the actual take bw down.

00:06:08:07 – 00:06:33:24
Speaker 1
I it a percent of normal. Yeah, yeah, actually I do have the loop I don’t know, it’s okay if Dan if you want to pass it back, I have that link I can show you. There. This is here’s the sounder. So plenty of cloudiness, but you can see through the sounder at some point and you see values, up around 25 to 30mm over the high plains of Colorado.

00:06:33:24 – 00:06:57:21
Speaker 1
So that’s from the Sound Earth. And I also had in this in this loop, I guess I didn’t I don’t have, you know, if you pass it back to Bernie, she can show you the actual values. I didn’t I did not include that in the blog post. So okay, so noting that when when be get that data blended sort of super nicely, a lot of folks are looking at.

00:06:57:23 – 00:07:25:03
Speaker 1
Yeah. Although I did have a if we have a look at the blended, it seems to have underestimated by a little bit, which I was kind of surprised at. It looks to me like it only used GPS because it does not seem to include the higher values that we saw on the sounder. So I yeah, I’m not really sure you know how it goes into the algorithm for blending.

00:07:25:06 – 00:07:51:13
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. Overlaying that there. Yeah. Because a lot of folks were asking is not necessarily just the variability out of it looking for like I said, is there a river. Was there any connection whether even interrupted by terrain but obviously interrupted by observing systems here where you got a lag. So, limited polar versus versus the GP?

00:07:51:16 – 00:07:54:14
Speaker 1
And finally it’s my for.

00:07:54:17 – 00:08:12:29
Speaker 2
And I think the key from this is that we were investing from areas where, where you see these very high values in the, the yellows and reds, and I’ll show that in a minute. In terms of the, the moisture source. But let’s see, did you have, any other loops to show Bernie?

00:08:13:01 – 00:08:41:10
Speaker 1
The only thing is I was going to, I don’t know what order I put some annotation on Scott’s, two of his modus, color composites, just to show where the cities are and where the rivers were that were affected and the precip total. I don’t know if it would want to turn to that because he was he wasn’t in this morning, but, I have that for at least Colorado we don’t have.

00:08:41:10 – 00:08:44:17
Speaker 1
It’s from New Mexico.

00:08:44:20 – 00:08:50:08
Speaker 2
Okay. I see you have the precip totals up. So we can maybe briefly look at those, or in the Boulder area.

00:08:50:11 – 00:09:11:28
Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah. Then you could probably bring that up. Yeah. So are you saying that here do we have, yes. I’m seeing the PTP right now, and this is actually out of Sims. Just one, so I’m not sure. Is this connected to a blog at all? I it’s like, it’s not. I guess we could add it on to Scott blog entry.

00:09:11:28 – 00:09:40:17
Speaker 1
I mean, I just happened to capture these, this week. I wasn’t that impressed and saw that. Well, put it on the blog or not, but I think they are. They ought to be added because they do add, a cut only in time of kind of what’s going on in general. And you do see the huge values that have been tropical Pacific and in the Bay of Campeche.

00:09:40:19 – 00:10:10:13
Speaker 1
So where the moisture was coming from, there’s just an amazing amount of moisture. Back and right now, even though up over, northern Colorado here it says we don’t have high values. For us, when we get well, we don’t see high precipitable water values like this very often at all. So especially in the month of September. Yeah.

00:10:10:15 – 00:10:36:17
Speaker 1
And in its surrounding as to to the west, I think this some of these values are associated with higher terrain and there just isn’t a whole lot of atmosphere above it. But for us, having a sounding that might have like some ten, A lot of moisture in it, that’s a lot. Okay. Do you want to show a quick show?

00:10:36:17 – 00:11:07:24
Speaker 1
Scott’s annotated, Yes. Okay. I guess I’m anxious to see how your expert expert annotations are, so I don’t have time. Yeah, yeah, I didn’t put too many. But I thought I would just put in, a few important things, like. And we’ll zoom in in this a little closer. I’m going to go between this one and the next one just to show you the before which this is from you.

00:11:08:00 – 00:11:41:29
Speaker 1
If you can’t read it, it’s from the 7th of September. So it’s before, the heavy rains and after the heavy rains from. So what are we looking at early? Well, this is image. This is a RGB, and, it uses modus channels. Actually I have it on another slide we can look at. It uses channel seven which is 2.1, as well as the point eight and the point six in the visible and near infrared regions.

00:11:42:01 – 00:12:04:16
Speaker 1
And what we normally look with is the point six and the visible. So the reason why we’re seeing a lot of the dark green is because we’re using a point eight channel, which, vegetation becomes highly reflective in that channel. And it’s not as reflective in the other channels. And clouds or especially water clouds are reflective in all three.

00:12:04:16 – 00:12:34:14
Speaker 1
So we see it’s more white. And the reason why we’re seeing, more of the water from the flooding is because in all three channels, the, water is not very reflective. And so, you can see that from yesterday, near the end of the day, the, crest of the water had reached, towards eastern Colorado. And if I zoom in on this, let me see.

00:12:34:16 – 00:12:54:10
Speaker 1
You can see here is the Colorado Nebraska border. And here’s the Colorado Kansas border on the right. So, so from the after picture, let’s go deeper and point out the cities.

00:12:54:12 – 00:13:00:01
Speaker 1
And another feature.

00:13:00:03 – 00:13:17:24
Speaker 1
One of the considerations we had was that you can actually see a pretty well on this. This is a darker red. And the reason is a lot of the vegetation was destroyed. And some of it you can see in some spots not completely, but and it’s growing back. But so this was the high park burn area.

00:13:17:24 – 00:13:43:09
Speaker 1
It actually goes a little further west. It’s covered by clouds. Now. So in this area is Fort Collins, Loveland, Lyon, Boulder, and then down in here, Denver and then surrounding suburbs. So you can, as we see on the next one, this is the South Platte River coming in from Denver and heading north down this way, the Boulder Creek coming in here.

00:13:43:11 – 00:14:09:14
Speaker 1
The same frame coming in from Lyons. They had flooding issues there as well, the big Thompson coming down into Loveland. And you can’t, guess it comes in through about here. And then, a lot of precip came off the high part fire and affected the, cash flow. Powder River, which comes in tribute. So. And those are the rivers of Santiam.

00:14:09:17 – 00:14:35:21
Speaker 1
And for those of you actually, I think most everybody’s familiar with what these little green, they look like circles. It’s from irrigated lands. And so you could see that and that’s why some of the other land is browner because of, drier because we had a very dry August in terms of Fort Collins, I had only a, little over a 10th of an inch in August.

00:14:35:23 – 00:15:11:27
Speaker 1
And. Okay. So do you want to see, we could pass it on to someone else. Yeah. Why don’t you give it back to me and I’ll show you the 1.61, okay? Because that that’s irrelevant for Abby. Because it will be on Abby. So this is this. This is an image that Scott Bock Meyer put together. And it’s two subsequent, sumi NP 1.61 passes, and you can actually 1.61, water is very absorbed, absorbs a whole lot of 1.61.

00:15:11:27 – 00:15:31:23
Speaker 1
So you’re releasing the water very nicely there. And you can actually see perhaps the, flood the head of the flood propagating down. I guess that’s the Platte River, the North Platte River, South Platte River, can’t remember which. It’s like, oh, yeah, I want to make it a little bit. I thought I had something. Okay, here you go.

00:15:31:26 – 00:15:50:22
Speaker 1
So that it is, that is a South Platte. So it’s separated by 90 minutes. So this is, you know, a little fortuitous for, the first, sumi NP pass. It was on the eastern edge, and the second one is on the way to that backwards. The first one is on the western edge, the second was, on the eastern edge.

00:15:50:22 – 00:16:10:06
Speaker 1
So you’re getting this, this image that you’re seeing in 90 minutes, about a 90 minute time step, and you’re seeing how the water has advanced. And again, this is 1.61. It’s something that it will be on Abby. So it kind of gives you an idea of what you can do with, the Abby data. When you’re getting something that’s every five minutes.

00:16:10:06 – 00:16:41:16
Speaker 1
It’s only it’ll only be two kilometer resolution versus this one kilometer. But, I mean, if you can see a flood water progressing like that over 90 minutes, I think this will be really valuable. For goes-r, and it goes our era for this kind of event and that’s, that’s from the 14th. And if we look at the same kind of imagery from, yesterday, you’ll see that the, the dark smear has already has progressed almost down to the, Colorado Nebraska border.

00:16:41:16 – 00:16:54:23
Speaker 1
So this region of flood waters is triggered, and you can monitor the region of flood waters progressing, downstream, by satellite. So that’s kind of exciting.

00:16:54:26 – 00:16:56:28
Speaker 2
Okay. Anything else got?

00:16:57:00 – 00:17:00:02
Speaker 1
No. Unless you want me to talk about the tropics, but,

00:17:00:04 – 00:17:10:19
Speaker 2
Okay, let me, show a few slides here that, I have prepared.

00:17:10:22 – 00:17:39:00
Speaker 2
So this slide right here, I wanted to identify the moisture source, a different vertical level. So I did a backwards trajectory from a point just west of Boulder, 100, 1000 and 3000m AGL. So the red line is the lowest level. And you can see it’s, pretty much from the northeast. And then the blue line is at 1000m AGL, and you can see that’s coming down from, Texas, Oklahoma region.

00:17:39:02 – 00:18:02:01
Speaker 2
And then the green line is higher level. That’s 3000 is around 550 to 600 millibars. So mid-level moisture coming from New Mexico. So so basically what we’re looking at, Sheldon Castleton put together this nice, graphic here, low level moisture coming from the Gulf of Mexico. And then that mid to higher level moisture coming from, the Pacific here.

00:18:02:01 – 00:18:27:29
Speaker 2
And you can see these very high values off the Pacific, the remnants of that, tropical cyclone over here, making its way towards this area here. So, so in the vertical, we had different, levels here. And of course, that’s important. In terms of precipitation efficiency being, pretty close to 100% when you have that, that moist layer over a very, very deep layer like we had.

00:18:28:01 – 00:18:55:03
Speaker 2
And another way to look at that is the, surrounding this particular plot is a climatology of the soundings from Denver between 1948 and 2012. These are the precipitable water values. The green at the top is the maximum values all time for each month. And then we have the 99th percentile. Two standard deviation, 75th percentile. The red line is the 50th percentile.

00:18:55:03 – 00:19:21:06
Speaker 2
So you can think of that as the mean. And then we have this, at the bottom of the very lowest values plotted here as well. So, on the morning of the 12th of September, the observed value was 1.33in, which, was the highest all time. And then it went back and looked at, actually just before that, zero zero on the 11th, it was actually at 1.41.

00:19:21:06 – 00:19:48:23
Speaker 2
So it would have been on a little bit more than that. So that just puts it in perspective that that was indeed, the most precipitable water ever observed, in the Denver sounding in the month of September and comparable to, the highest ever in June. And I would suspect that’s probably from the June 15th, 65, event, which was significant flooding along the Front Range here.

00:19:48:26 – 00:20:14:17
Speaker 2
So, the last thing I wanted to show here is, if you’re familiar with the satellite rainfall estimates, whether from Stamper or the Goes-r. Spie products here, one of the known, limitations of these are whenever you have warm rain processes going on where you have relatively warm brightness temperatures, remember the, water vapor loop that Scott showed earlier?

00:20:14:20 – 00:20:38:12
Speaker 2
They were very warm brightness temperatures during the event here. We didn’t have, cold convective cloud tops. So given that and the fact that we had significant orographic enhancement going on, those are limitations for these products. And in fact, they did severely underrepresented, this particular event here. So I just wanted to point out that there’s are known limitations.

00:20:38:12 – 00:21:08:27
Speaker 2
And and in fact, these products did struggle here. So, we’re actually very curious to hear what happened down in Albuquerque’s area as well, because I, I think I told Ed and, Monday or one of those days last week, I, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the radar scope from Albuquerque completely for before. So, so, Albuquerque, if you’d like to discuss or share, some of the issues that you had down there would be glad to hear about it.

00:21:09:00 – 00:21:52:01
Speaker 1
Look at Brian. I just went through storm data, at least for half the event, and it’s interesting. We did have some historic flooding on some of the main, some rivers, like the Pecos River. Few places, crested, higher than they ever crested before and, by several feet in some cases. We did. You know, this graphic does verify we had widespread 3 to 5 inch rainfall amounts, including in the city of Albuquerque and then a few of our areas, along southern, southern aspects did receive, almost ten inches.

00:21:52:04 – 00:22:23:26
Speaker 1
So, like the, the, the Hayman’s mountains around Los Alamos, Vandalia was impacted severely. They had an 11ft flood wave. And also around Glenwood, another south facing aspect, saw a 17 to 18ft flood wave come down. The, I believe in Silver Creek or the creek. I can’t remember the name of the creek there. But it completely destroyed the catwalk, which is, a point of interest for a lot of people.

00:22:23:26 – 00:22:54:19
Speaker 1
And I know there have been weddings down there, so it’s quite a sad story, for that. And then, we did have, some impacts up in the Crystal mountains, too. Not as severe, but just widespread, dirt and gravel road destruction across a lot of the, the northeastern part of the state alarmingly slopes and like we are you were saying earlier, we fortunately didn’t have that upslope flow out of the East, like, the boulder area did.

00:22:54:21 – 00:23:21:12
Speaker 1
So, we were generally kind of in the north flow, but still just a tremendous amount of moisture. And, and incredible amounts of flooding, really. I think every, event down there, I assume so. Excuse me. Was it a multi-day event like it was up here in Colorado? Oh, yeah, about 5 to 6 days. Yeah. Every time you think at least the plume moved around a little bit.

00:23:21:12 – 00:23:44:20
Speaker 1
So the first big day was the eastern Plains almost straight from south to north. And then the plume nudged westward, although it didn’t stay to the west quite as long as we were anticipating. It came right back to the central areas. And, and then the West kind of got hit again. So it was about three days of really well-defined plume.

00:23:44:20 – 00:24:10:10
Speaker 1
And then after that, just sportier, more conservative, but oh my gosh, Annie, everything was already so saturate. So anytime you got a, strong cell or some training so you have additional flooding. So those last couple days were interesting because we were seeing River rises, where we didn’t have rain. And I think that was, you know, catching a lot of people off guard.

00:24:10:13 – 00:24:32:23
Speaker 1
Yeah. That’s what struck me so much about this was the relentless, day after day of significant rain and embedded within that to one night of really bad rain. But, yeah. Okay. There was a, location north of Albuquerque that experienced, six inch per hour rain rate at one point. And, and that actually did go for an hour.

00:24:32:25 – 00:24:55:18
Speaker 1
So that there was that was, I think that was right near Vandalia where they had that 11ft flood wave. And interestingly enough, they reported a higher crest with that event, three years following, a lot of conscious burn than they did immediately following the wildfire. So, you know, you would think the forest would have had some time to heal.

00:24:55:18 – 00:25:14:02
Speaker 1
Soil would have been able to observe a little bit of moisture. But with that kind of rain, right on the, on the, topography. Yeah. I think that was the thing, you know, that it was just a higher rain rate. You know, those areas have flooded pretty good. A lot of the debris is gone now, and I think the soils are starting to absorb some.

00:25:14:02 – 00:25:39:09
Speaker 1
But they were rain rates that we haven’t seen since those fires. So it Albuquerque make out okay or Albuquerque the city. Yeah sure. You know it was interesting week. One of the upstream gauges showed a fairly significant rise. And so the idea was on a Friday night that we would maybe get some pretty significant rises in, in the Rio Grande in Albuquerque.

00:25:39:09 – 00:26:06:02
Speaker 1
And we put out a warning they really didn’t materialize, in part because, the wave was dissipated a bit and it’s on its track towards the city, but also because the last time we had impacts, the river edge was so different that there were fewer ditches and it hadn’t been as well constructed to absorb the, higher flows.

00:26:06:02 – 00:26:31:11
Speaker 1
And so Albuquerque itself did pretty good, probably in the Rio Grande. Do you think Socorro County had just jumped at where a couple, the real water, which is almost always dry, really, dumped down and it’s still have 6000 cfs flowing through it now, there’s many days later. So we’re seeing flows. I mean, I’ve seen the stages that I’ve never seen in the 19 years I’ve been here.

00:26:31:14 – 00:26:53:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s exactly here. And it’s interesting you talked about that one surge because we had a similar thing. It looked like it was heading right down Boulder Creek. And they were they were knocking on doors at two in the morning telling people will leave. But we never saw any response in the in the gauge at Boulder. Somehow we of water, sort of somehow dissipated on its way down here is is pretty remarkable.

00:26:53:14 – 00:27:16:23
Speaker 1
And, we’re not quite sure why or how, you know, but, you know, there’s always got to maybe one thing that we could we could show at the end is, Scott was talking yesterday. We were talking about this. There’s a similar, set up in Mexico now with the this high. But fortunately, we the plume is going to hit straight across, I think more into Texas.

00:27:16:23 – 00:27:37:09
Speaker 1
I have some very hefty rain amounts forecast by the models over the next few days. Scott, I don’t know if you have that loop or, or do you have a live loop? Maybe a long loop? Anybody? I have a water vapor image. Yeah, it’s just a it’s black and white.

00:27:37:12 – 00:27:56:22
Speaker 1
I guess the point is that. Yeah. It’s almost, you know, it’s kind of flipped in that I think the, Right. So you can, you can see on here that the, let me go to just look at maybe I’ll go to Conus.

00:27:56:24 – 00:28:16:15
Speaker 1
I mean, there’s stuff here. It’s popping along the plains, but the stuff from Manuel and the former ING. Is it Ingrid? That’s, dissipated, but there’s still plenty of moisture from Ingrid. And then maybe the next system here. They were talking. They were talking this morning, though. This is going to head up toward, away from the Western Gulf.

00:28:16:15 – 00:28:42:18
Speaker 1
So. But there’s still plenty of moisture here, ready to be drawn northward. I don’t know if the, there’s a system coming in on the West Coast. I’m not sure how that’s going. How much that’s going to draw all the moisture over Mexico northward, but it does look like it’s being shunted more off to the east, which I suppose is good news for, for New Mexico and Colorado if it but but yeah, it looks like we could see some pretty heavy amounts, you know, Texas eastward.

00:28:42:21 – 00:28:58:12
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. Let me just put up the mimic DPW.

00:28:58:15 – 00:29:34:15
Speaker 1
So you can see plenty of. Are you pulling or moving northwestward? Up toward the Gulf Coast. Whether or not that all makes it on land or gets shunted off to the east, because there is that big system dropping. And we have we’re scheduled to have a big front come through here on Friday, and that’s going to draw some of that, some of that moisture off toward the East Coast, rather than having it funnel up along the Front Range again.

00:29:34:17 – 00:29:43:17
Speaker 2
Okay. Any other questions or discussions?

00:29:43:19 – 00:29:50:17
Speaker 2
Okay. Well, I think, that concludes, the visit satellite chat for today. Well, thank you everybody for attending.