HikeArizona.COM

The endless chatter of weather.

I awoke overnight to booming thunder and flashes of lightning. What a surprise treat!
Rain gauge tallied .30" in the morning.

Nice rain at 16th and Indian School. Washed the car and got the dust off.

One of the more impressive photos of a monsoon storm was posted by 3TV tonight. Taken by helicopter pilot Bruce Haffner.

http://www.azfamily.com/story/32473724/ ... wer-outage

Super cool!

chumley wrote:One of the more impressive photos of a monsoon storm was posted by 3TV tonight. Taken by helicopter pilot Bruce Haffner.

http://www.azfamily.com/story/32473724/ ... wer-outage

Super cool!

Yes. Sadly, imagine that, two times as wide, if not more and a tornado is what the F5s back east look like.

Quite the lightning show east of Safford right now! Hope it doesn't come over my house.

Edit: It has been hitting my house for an hour now - really scary storm, and there is going to be some serious flooding around here. Cant wait to check the gauge!

83 hundredths of an inch at Roper Lake - thanks rwstorm, rain gauge is awesome!

Heat arrived in NJ this week. It was in the mid/upper 90s today, but the asphalt must be quite a bit warmer. I burned the ball of my foot when I took a half-hour walk this afternoon in dress shoes. It's the same walk I take two or three days a week and the same shoes, but I've never had anything like that happen before.

@big_load
Dress shoes? Okay, I see the entire problem differently. I feel that the problem is that you actually OWN dress shoes! When are you moving to Arizona? ;)

@azbackpackr

I was thinking that I rarely wear dress shoes in AZ, especially in the summer. Oddly enough, my wool dress shirt and pants were entirely comfortable, perhaps thanks to a little breeze. I hope to bail out of the rat race in three years. It could be less under some conditions, but their occurrence is uncertain.

Big uptick in moisture and storm activity predicted for the next few days and into early next week. I can live with that.

Tucson is getting plenty of rain tonight! Storm hit hard at my house around 6pm and it's been raining constantly for the past 1.5 hours. Hoping for more throughout the weekend

The valley of the sun is getting some serious stormage right now too. Will be interesting to see the totals later on.

@the_eagle should be out on Empire Blvd today ... Rainbow Valley is under a Flood Warning with as much as 2.87" in one gauge out there!

Looks like South Mtn got a nice soaking of about half an inch. I think lightning was the real story last night though!

I watched lots of impressive flashes behind Squaw and Camelback, from a 4th floor window, last evening. Scrubbed my night hike plans, but it was worth it.

Is there a link to the rainbow valley gauge? I'd like to see that.
I recall from the 14ers website, when I was into cold wet things, back in 2007 and 2008, that very late July and early August are the peak of Monsoon Season. If this the 5 day QPF is any indication, I would say that is correct. It will be interesting to see how accurate that graphic proves to be.

Jim_H wrote: Is there a link to the rainbow valley gauge? I'd like to see that.

It's on the fcdmc map. 6955 Maricopa Mtns.

Decent rain totals around 3/4 of an inch per the flood control district, in the 16th ST and Camelback area. Lots of ponded water in the grassy fields. However, now it feels like I'm in the jungles of Vietnam, or worse: Florida.

@Jim_H
I agree. I love the rain, but not a big fan of humidity.

Watching Dave Munsey on channel 10 has been driving me crazy - he keeps saying the measurements wrong. For instance for .8 inches he says "eight hundreths" when it's really eight tenths - or 80 hundreths. He has been a weatherman for like 40 years, so I know he knows the difference, so why is he saying it wrong?!

@cactuscat
He probably has a degree in communication, so..... naturally he communicates very well.


I checked rainlog and it matched an updated flood control data point nearby where I live and it appears that I may have received close to 3 inches. The rainlog spot said 2.90 inches. I know that is usually regarded as too much, too fast for the desert, and for roofs, parking lots and roads, that is just going to run off. However, there are a lot of yards with berms, and grassy areas for playing fields, and bermed parks nearby me, and these all receive flood irrigation. So, it was sort of like free flood irrigation from the sky. That 2.90" probably soaked in pretty well in those areas.

Weather reports say my house got 2.56" last night, most of it within an hour.
What's monsoon total average? Around 2.25?