1000km Alert - Mojave Desert to Reno & SW Nevada - for Sunday - Graphics/Maps and my Analysis

Here's a rather technical look at how I'm analyzing soaring weather these days. Browse some weather maps depicting soaring weather forecasts for Sat, Sun and Mon July 12-14, 2014:


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sl1h0m3m5...Id1BGMq-26Rt6a

The 500mb charts depict winds and Relative Humidity at 18k msl for 2pm on Sat, Sun and Mon. Note the developing high center Sat night in Central Nevada. Monsoon moisture from Arizona and NW Mexico gets swept into the SE Deserts of Southern CA late Sunday, then up over all the Mojave, Sierra and Central CA area Monday.

The XCSkies graphic shows cloud bases at 5pm Sunday. Just enough cu cloud cover (at least I hope it's only Scatter cu... and now mid layer altocumulus). Bases Mt Whitney north to Bridgeport are 17.5-18.5msl. Inyo Mtns eastward and to the south bases 15-16msl. Barstow will probably have an active area of thunderstorms propagating toward the west late afternoon Sun toward Four Corner near sunset.

The time series graphs are a little hard to read and understand, but show hourly soundings with winds aloft. Times along x-axis are GMT (18Z =11am; 21Z =2pm etc). Heights msl give thermal altitudes (MIXING HEIGHT) in red; LCL Lifted Condensation Level or cu cloud bases in dark green; Surface temp DegC in light green; Surface winds kts bold black; 1km agl winds kts thin black line.

Concentrate on the file names with 2014071200 in the prefix. This represents the NAM numerical model initialized on July 12 at 00Z (5pm Friday).

KMHV = Mojave
NID = China Lake
KDAG = Barstow-Daggett
EDW = Edwards AFB
C01 = Point in high Sierras west of Bishop

The colored graphics have the same line plots, but add relative humidity.

Looking at the KMHV time series plot, note how the MIXING HEIGHT (thermal height) goes up steadily from Sat to Sun to Mon. But, the LCL (cloud bases) goes down from about 15.5msl to 14.5 msl on Monday. Barstow Daggett shows a big drop in cloud bases with showers/TS and high RH on Monday.

From this explanation, once can gather quite a bit of soaring weather information for the next three days. These time series hourly sounding plots are now one of my key tools.

Walt Rogers WX