Comments on: Monsoon Season

By: DILBERT DOGBERT

DILBERT DOGBERT — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 03:32:49 +0000

The season when thunder speaks – Tony Hillerman I think. Read the Great Taos Bank Robbery.
A good funny story and short.

By: Linkmeister

Linkmeister — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 06:43:32 +0000

Ah. I’ve got my N/S/E/W directions mixed up.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:36:15 +0000

Your office is in the PMM building?

In Social Sciences.

By: agm

agm — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:00:52 +0000

BTW, have you ever seen that happen, not with rain but with a wall of flying dust? It’s just the most mind-boggling event, to have a wall of pure, unrefined brownness coming at you, and with visible speed.

By: agm

agm — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:59:15 +0000

Ah, I miss monsoon season. Particularly that the f’ing rain and clouds go away after a little, allowing the return of the sun.

By: Linkmeister

Linkmeister — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:39:14 +0000

Your office is in the PMM building? Or have I misidentified it?

Yes, I attended that institution about a thousand years ago.

By: quicksand

quicksand — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:48:12 +0000

It’s really remarkable.

I spent a few summers at, uh, that other university in Tempe more than 20 summers ago, and I remember those monsoons vividly.

And the aftermath—when it’s wet and 100+ degrees, the contrast between the cool air-conditioned university buildings and the environment immediately outside was astonishing. Stepping outdoors was like walking into a solid wall of atmosphere.

By: ajay

ajay — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:54:54 +0000

Can’t imagine why you left.

Clue’s in the picture. 37C. In other words – if you go outside at mid-day for more than a few minutes, you will start to suffer radiation burns. If you go outside without water for more than a few hours, you will start to die.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:29:47 +0000

Monsoon prescriptivism is all wet.

By: mollymooly

mollymooly — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:30:23 +0000

Echoing #4. I’ve never been to SWUSA and I’ve never heard “monsoon” used elsewhere in this sense. I propose “monsoon storm” as a compromise name, since the underlying cause is indeed a monsoon wind.

By: Ciarán

Ciarán — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:02:30 +0000

I always thought there was something marvellously efficient about that sort of cloudburst. In your native country it clouded over in mid-June and there hasn’t been a dry day since.

Can’t imagine why you left.

By: dawn

dawn — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 04:06:31 +0000

I love this time of the year. Here, in Flagstaff, we got a lot of rain all day. It was lovely.

By: Russell L. Carter

Russell L. Carter — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:30:27 +0000

Up here in the mountains we had a normal monsoon day. By 9AM the lightning all around caused me to put off my daily ride until noon. Probably reached a high of 79F or so, a week ago the high was 20F higher. Elevation 5500’.

By: Gene O'Grady

Gene O'Grady — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:16:39 +0000

My wife spent one very unhappy year in Twenty-Nine Palms ca. 1961, during which they had a monsoon like this. When we visited there 35 years later, she took me to see where they had lived and was astonished that the flood damage had not yet been cleaned up.

That may have been the trip we saw the ocatilla in bloom—they’d always been dead sticks and suddenly they were brilliant red flowers.

By: JP Stormcrow

JP Stormcrow — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:15:15 +0000

Since someone has to play the stultifying pedant on threads like this …

From the Phoenix Weather Service site:
Correct definition of Monsoon: Any wind that reverses its direction seasonally.
Wrong definition of Monsoon: Thunderstorms that occur in Arizona during the summer are called monsoons.

The monsoon in Phoenix is said to start when there are three consecutive days when the dew point averages 55 degrees or higher. Average start date is July 7th.

This year the Weather Service made a lame proposal to scrap even referring to it as a monsoon. “Severe thunderstorm season” appears to have been the hopelessly prosaic alternative.

And I would love to see more recent data, but apprently development between the ‘50s and the ‘80s did change the pattern of summer rain in the urban areas.

Summertime diurnal precipitation patterns for Phoenix, Arizona are analyzed for the period 1954 through 1985. Although the mean precipitation amounts and frequencies for the entire summer monsoon season have not shown any significant effects from the rapidly developing urban heat island, diurnal patterns have displayed substantial changes in the recent period of explosive population growth. During the most recent 16 years, late afternoon and evening storms have become more frequent and produce greater rainfall totals. Sharp declines are noted in the frequency of rain events between midnight and noon; especially large drops occur in the rainfall amounts between 9.00 and 12.00 MST.