HikeArizona.COM

The endless chatter of weather.

Nice little thunderstorm here last evening. 5/16" in my rain guage.

Nice LIghtning Show too!

Why do I hear water running? Oh, it's raining in Scottsdale.

big_load wrote:Why do I hear water running? Oh, it's raining in Scottsdale.

And it already stopped.

Flash flood watch up here in N. AZ all day today. I guess they are expecting some gully washers. Yesterday was one of the prettiest days I've seen this season at the Canyon (South Rim). Very clear air, little white puffy clouds, light breeze.

NWS says 3 inches dropped from here in NE Payson to Washington Park yesterday evening. Any precipitation is expected to prolong the urban and small stream flooding. Sure is beautiful outside though (72degrees)

While radar estimates are not an exact science, I think it's accurate to say that most of the valley has seen rainfall totals that are less than what some of the forecasts were calling for a few days ago. Of course there are some spots across the state that got hammered (Wickenburg among them).

Could the Sea of Cortez really have been hit that hard? 16"+?

Hopefully the valley warms up today and the moisture that remains can fire off some rain and fill in that big void shown in the middle of the map!

@chumley
Yeah, send some to my house too. Tucson got totally ripped off.

1.6" the past 24 hrs. at my home in Payson

Chumley's map is over the course of a week. It seems reasonable to expect that a major storm can drop 16 inches over a week. Some hurricanes can drop that much rain in a day.

@nonotTrue. But it's not as if a hurricane hit the sea of Cortez. Not even the southern part of it. The circulation was all well off the Baja coast. The moisture from the storm that fed into Arizona needed some dynamic trigger to produce storms. It's unusual for that to happen over the open water in such small area and in such extreme amounts. I think.

I've been told those types of maps are radar estimates, not actual data

@joe bartels
I think that's your second post in the weather thread this year!

For as much blustering as it did, the weather disappointed me. It rained four times in the various places I was at, which combined weren't enough to wash the first day's dust off my rental car.

@big_load
If Vulture Peak had been on your hiking list you'd be telling a different story. The gauge out there clocked in 5.20"

Yes, the distribution is pretty uneven. The rim near Payson looked like it got soaked pretty well the day before. There was lots of mud and quite a few puddles. The plants and trees were still dripping.

It's this alarmist click-bait media crap that makes me think whatever El Niño actually does occur is going to result in none of the weather phenomena typically associated with El Niño.

“[El Nino] is growing and the prediction models say it’s going to get stronger,” Barnston said. “And that’s our prediction, that it will become a strong event, most likely.”

The strongest in recorded history? Is that greater than or less than the time I've been on the planet? Just exactly when did we start measuring the sea surface temperature of the remote equatorial Pacific?

Interesting article though. Lots of pretty graphs and retweets. Look now though because I'm pretty sure we're all gonna die before winter.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/cap ... n-history/

I've been away from home enough to not know for sure, but I think this is the first widespread monsoon activity to hit the valley this year?

Though it appears to be hit or miss so far. Over .5" here in Tempe, over 1" in the McDowells, and yet some spots haven't seen anything yet.

Radar looks good so hopefully everywhere in the valley will see some measurable rain in the next few hours.
:FG:

Nothing in the Desert Ridge area