Can You Hear Me Over There?: Dispatches from a Desert Isle: Heatwaves, Haboobs, and Monsoons, oh my!

Extreme Weather Channel Presents...

Wacky Desert Weather!

It's hot, it's cold, it's drier than a bone, wait, is that a river running down my street?!?

... it's Arizona!!!

So, in Arizona, oftentimes it's very very hot in the daytime and very very cold at night. (Well, really cold "for the desert," like 40, but still, sometimes lower...)

**Tucson Temperature Records**
Record High:	117 deg F on June 26, 1990
Record Low:	6 deg F on January 7, 1913

But the real issue is what comes from the sky—rain, for starters:

Yes, we've had some rain this winter, but most of the really extreme weather happens in the summer here.

In one year, Tucson gets:

15 days of rain

12" of rain

(that works out to >1" per day)

In the summer, they could get 12" in less than a week!

One time (July, 29, 1958) they got almost 4" in one day!

That's no ordinary rain!!

It's a

Summers bring monsoons,

huge storms that create heavy rains and, in Arizona at least, LOTS of lightning.

They make for some really dramatic pictures.

Here comes a storm towards the Grand Canyon (ooooooohhhhh, aaaahhhhhhh...)...

Arizona Lightning Facts:

An average of 673,320 lightning bolts touch down in Arizona each year!

The most active lightning region in North America is right near Tucson.

The lightning often causes wildfires.

Boo, lightning.

So, what creates monsoons?

I'm condensing Southwest Climate Change here:

The engine of the monsoon is the sun, which warms the land and Pacific Ocean at different rates, inciting a tug-of-war with the winds. Until the land sufficiently warms, air flow aloft maintains a westerly flow. When the winds do an about-face, the monsoon begins.

The monsoon first begins in northern Mexico in May. The hot summer sun evaporates water from the Gulfs of Mexico and California, creating humidity over the land which produces rain.

In Arizona, monsoon storms typically arrive in early July after the region has baked in the sun for months. Hot air has risen like a helium balloon, which creates a vacuum lower down, quickly pulling moist, ocean-cooled air into the lower atmosphere. When the heat imbalance between upper and lower air becomes large enough, winds over the Southwest, near an altitude of 30,000 feet (airplane level), take a U-turn westward, pulling moisture from the Gulf of Mexico; at the same time, the near-surface air over the Gulf of California rushes northward into Arizona and New Mexico, carrying with it moisture from that gulf.

Moisture from two bodies of water + heat + cold = lots of rain!

Yeah. That thing on the left that looks like a curtain is rain. All rain.

That's okay. Lego Batman brought his Lego Umbrella.

So ANYway...

monsoons also bring:

dust storms (cough cough) and flash floods

Sometimes the storm releases a downburst of cold air,
which blows dry, loose desert dust up
to form a dust wall up to
100 miles wide!!!
that can travel at
60 miles per hour (freeway speed).
Yeesh.

This kind of dust storm is called a HABOOB.