Celia

Weather: Precipitation twice this week, both times the result of moisture kicked up by Celia, and both times with long periods of gentle rain and no strong winds.

Last useful rain: 6/26.  Week’s low: 57 degrees F.  Week’s high: 93 degrees F in the shade.  Winds were up to 47 mph in Santa Fé on Sunday.  Days in June with winds over 25 mph: 21 of 25; day’s with temperatures in the 90s: 15 of 25.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, bird of paradise, desert willow, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, fern bush, Arizona and  red tipped yuccas, Asiatic lilies, daylilies, Russian sage, sweet peas, bouncing Bess, hollyhocks, Shasta daisy, yellow yarrow; one person has apricots on the ground

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Bush morning glory, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, silver leaf nightshade, wild licorice, alfalfa, white sweet clover, scurf peas, fern leaf and leather leaf globe mallows, buffalo gourd, Queen Anne’s lace, velvetweed, Hopi tea, strap leaf and golden hairy asters, goat’s beards, native and common dandelions; juniper berries formed

What’s blooming in my yard: Miniature and floribunda roses, cliff rose, tamarix cultivars, regale lilies, daylily cultivars, Johnson blue geranium, white spurge, golden spur columbine, winecup mallows, sidalcea, ladybells, coral and foxglove beard tongues, Maltese crosses, Jupiter’s beard, blue flax, catmints, pink evening primroses, tomatillo, Mexican hats, black-eyed Susans, chocolate flowers, plains and lance leaf coreopsis, blanket flowers, anthemis, white yarrow, purple cone flowers

What bedding plants are blooming: Pansies, snapdragons; someone in the village has petunias

Animal sightings: Rabbit, two hummingbirds, western chickadees, geckoes, unidentified butterfly, hawk moth, small bees, hornets, lots of small grasshoppers after rain, harvester and sidewalk ants, earthworms; hear crickets

Tasks: I finally found the harvester ant hill.  Every time I’ve been working along the west side of the drive, I saw the large black insects crawling through the areas where I was working.  Saturday, they were particularly active.  They weren’t just climbing around the brick edging, but were carrying seeds across dead grasses to the western fence.

I went out with a bottle of poison and found a very large, say 18" across hill, that was several inches high in the crown of the ranch road.  The road has not been used in years.  I continued along the road, and found another hill of large, red ants, which I also treated.

While I was out there, and still wearing rubber gloves, I picked the Russian thistle carcasses that had gotten caught in salt bushes.  I took them to the far side of the road, so they would have a clear path north when the winds return.

After the rains pass this coming week, both the sidewalk ants and thistle seedlings will multiply.  I figured there was no point in going after them before then.  However, I did order new batteries for my weed eater in anticipation.  After two years, they only would stay charged about five minutes.

Weekly update: Our moisture is coming from Celia.  While some thought it would become a hurricane, it has remained an off-shore tropical storm that has moved slowly from the southwest coast of México to the southern tip of Baja.  It has kicked up moisture that moved north through the western valleys into New Mexico.

The unusual feature is the north-south movement; usually moisture moves from southwest to northeast.  Mexico’s weather service noted Celia had “extensive cloud bands, in interaction with a low-pressure channel.” [1]

At our end, the weather bureau has variously said “the H5 high centers itself still to our east over the SE US while another closed low dives southward into central CA,” [2] and “a rich monsoon moisture plume is expected as NM will be in a weakness between two high pressure centers.” [3]

What our local forecasters didn’t say was that the high pressure area to the east, which is keeping the moisture over Rio Arriba County, is a heat dome.  It apparently began last winter when temperatures in the western Pacific warmed.  When the air heated by the ocean moved east over the colder eastern Pacific, it rose and moved onto land. [4]

An atmospheric science professor at Iowa State University suggests the warm mass then ran into the jet stream, “a band of fast winds high in the atmosphere that generally runs west to east.”  William Gallus said the jet stream normally meanders in a wavelike pattern between north and south.  When heat causes the movements to “become bigger, they move slower and can become stationary.  That’s when heat domes can occur.” [5]

In Minnesota, Sven Sundgaard thought the conditions that now affect us began when that hot air reached the Desert Southwest two to three weeks ago.  That was when our temperatures reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. [6]

The dome formed as the heat compressed the air under it, driving out the moisture.  That, in turn, meant fewer clouds to block the sun.  With no moisture and increasing heat, the dome became a stable mass. [6]  It now  has moved east to channel our rains, which will continue until the dome moves farther east or Celia dissipates.

I have no idea how much rain has fallen here.  As of 9 am Sunday, the National Weather Service report for Los Alamos said at least 1.3" in the past two days.

Saturday evening around 6:30 pm, I walked around my property.  Then, the standing water was confined to the yard of my neighbor who scrapes away his vegetation several times a year.  I discovered a dent in the eave of my garage where water was pouring down.  That explained why the gravel in that area always disappears.

The ground between the grasses to the south, salt bushes to the west, and winterfat to the north was wet and tan in color.  The soil in my garden beds, where I occasionally add manure and fertilizer, was darker.  The ranch road was the palest shade, especially the track on the west side where I dumped the Russian thistles.

Of course, water was trapped in the bed with the pansies, because it’s under the drip line of the back porch and gets all the water that falls on the back half of the house.  The area near the down spout for the eave on the front side also had a layer of water.

This morning when I made the same circuit, water was beginning to pool between the winterfats, especially those just south of the alfalfa near the crab apples.  In back, the shade bed was filled to the capacity, and the overflow was draining past the lilac and along a path that had formed in back when I was removing Russian thistles in April.

In front, water had filled some low places in some beds, but nothing was trapped in the brick-lined ditch that carries water away.

The greater affects were beyond my fences.  The yard of my neighbor, which had some water last night now, was filled with pools of water.  He has the misfortune of having his drive at the point where the road curves, so some of the water that is flowing downhill on the asphalt continues into his yard.

More of it flows into the downhill ranch road, which had water running on the surface.  My neighbor to the north cuts his vegetation whenever it gets high.  The previous owner scraped it late in summer.  The result is standing water on the downhill side, just above the part of my drive that goes along the north fence.

I did that walk about 7 am, when it was raining gently.  When I went out two hours later, the downfall was just a mist, the running water had stopped from lack of supply, and the standing water all had sunk into the ground.  It will be a few days before we can know if it finally reached the roots of the native vegetation.

Notes on photographs:
1.  Asiatic lily hybrid, 24 June 2022.
2.  Daylily tetraploid cultivar, 25 June 2022.

End notes:
1.  “Tropical Storm Celia Continues To Intensify and Could Become a Hurricane.  The Mexacinist website, 23 June 2022.

2.  Guyer.  “Forecast Discussion” for 14 June 2022 at 2:18 am.  United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service website for Los Alamos, New Mexico.  For what it’s worth, NOAA defines “H5” as “500 millibar level height (in a standard atmosphere this is near 5,500 meters (18,000 ft).”

3.  “Forecast Discussion” for 23 June 2022 at 3:30 am, National Weather Service website for Los Alamos.

4.  “What Is a Heat Dome?”  NOAA, Ocean Service website, last updated 7 July 2021.  Research done by NOAA’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections Program.

5.  William Gallus.  “What Is a Heat Dome?”  The Conversation website, 22 June 2022.

6.  Sven Sundgaard.  “Tracking the Heat Dome: Short and Long-Term Impacts for Minnesota.”  Bring Me the News website, 11 June 2022.

7.  Sundgaard.