Soon, the Monsoon

[dancinghorse]

Today is a harbinger.

Every year Arizona gets a summer monsoon. It's not a figure of speech--it's the real thing, the Mexican Monsoon to be exact. It usually arrives around the Fourth of July (fireworks by Mother Nature to go with man-made rockets) and stays until about Labor Day, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Have you seen the Kitt Peak lightning photo? That's a one-minute time exposure.

We're still in the dry season now. It hasn't rained in weeks. There's been barely a cloud in the sky. Everything is so dry it crackles, and the palo verde and ocotillo have dropped their leaves. It hasn't been a hot year--after a blazing first week of June, temps in Tucson have hovered around 100 degrees F, which is fairly normal for the season. (It's A Dry Heat!)

Today, there's a change. It's not real yet--it's just a tease--but a little before noon, flotillas of cumulus started forming overhead, starting in the southeast (where the moisture streams in from Mexico). There's a dry westerly fighting it, and the clouds are ragged along the edges from it, but they keep in piling up. The air has a weird smell: instead of sharp dryness catching at the linings of the nose, there's a thickness that says moisture. My evaporative coolers suddenly aren't working so well. If I had a stillsuit, I'd be starting to get clammy in it.

It's just a tease. Official monsoon is three consecutive days of dewpoints of 55F or above, which means a steady stream of moisture from the southeast, ongoing storms in Sonora sending outflows northward, and day after day of boomers starting earlier and earlier and going later and later until they dissipate, then reappear a day or two later in a season-long cycle. The air at ground level is still dry enough to make the horses' tails stand on end, but they're not the full-blown static-charge fiber optics of a day or two ago. There's an odd wind blowing--not sure which direction it wants to come from.

Supposedly this is a three-day surge and then the westerlies will be back--but it's a promise. In a week or two or three (or possibly even this week if everything cooperates--nobody really understands the phenomenon), the real thing will be here, with wild boomers and torrents of rain and a new growing season. The Colorado River toads will come out from under the house (huge things, the mother toad is a foot long) and park under the barn floods at night and chow down on bugs, the little frogs and toads will hatch in the sometime ponds, and every day will start off like a sauna, rise to a sweaty crescendo, then sometime after noon, blow apart in waves of storms.

I love the monsoon. It kills the joints and is scary when the lightning walks, with power failures and wind damage and wildfires and all the rest of it, and evening rides get washed out as often as not, but it's still one of my favorite seasons in the Southwest. Veils of rain sweep across the valleys, lightning does a wardance on the mountains, and the green things come back--even start to bloom.

It's coming. I can smell it. Soon.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I was just noticing the startling number of clouds outside the window. The dragon isn't going anywhere yet, but it has been put on notice, I think.

(I once did a "nature scavenger hunt" with the Scout troop where the things they needed to find included "a cloud." But it was May. We looked and we looked, but we couldn't find even a hint of a single one. Somehow, I don't think the writers of the Brownie handbook had anticipated that possibility ...)

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Writers of handbooks don't know about our planet.

What did you use instead of a cloud?

The icon is a Tucson landmark--the statue of Padre Kino in last year's monsoon. No, not a time exposure! It was in the paper last year. They have a whole slew of monsoon photos in their archives.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I assured them having tried to find a cloud was good enough, and we moved on. :-)

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Ah--points for effort. 8)

[janni.livejournal.com]

Brownies especially get points for effort. Their badges are even called "Try Its"--you don't have to succeed at any of it, just give it an honest go.

Though there is a "give it a try" ethos throughout, for all that with older girls there's more emphasis on actually doing.

[starfall42.livejournal.com]

There's also an article going around reporting that the "Sunshine State" is actually #6 in sunshine. #1 is Arizona. CA, NV, NM, and TX are 2-5. Yuma, AZ gets an average of 242 clear sunny days a year.

The editor of the Republic once said he knows the monsoon season is here when he starts getting letters complaining about the term "monsoon". :-)

No twinges of monsoons here in Phoenix yet, though that's normal -- Tucson gets it first. The radar maps show some storms south of Douglas right now.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Cool article. I believe it, too. I love the truth about Florida--it's the most partly-cloudy state in the lower 48.

[windrose.livejournal.com]

Funny how we locals all get tuned to the feel of rain coming. I could sense something was up today simply by the quality of the light coming through the windows. When I stepped outside, the clouds clinched it. Those are rain clouds, just baby ones for now, but you can feel Mama Monsoon hovering nearby.

[larryhammer]

17% humidity at 3 pm is not a dragon, but something more of a swamp monster — a wyrven, perhaps. Nor is a change of thunderstorms on Wednesday.

A change of air, a change of tone. Potentials, like the crackle of static before the bolt strikes. But not the crackle of dessication — that's the dragon.

---L.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Beautiful!

Weather is a wonderful thing.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I loved Tucson thunderstorms when I was little. The charged air just felt magical.

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

Many years ago when I was coming to see you, I drove across the desert right behind the rain. It was hot and clear, but the desert was flooded. Very eerie. The highway I was on was just an inch or so above the water and there was no one else on the road. Right ahead of me was this sheet of water. I never caught up with it.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's so desert-y.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Late summer we often race the storms along I-25, when we head up to visit Larry's folks in New Mexico ...

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Ah... you, too, have a storm season.

Here people say there are four seasons, just like in the north, but in truth we have a hybrid system and more potent than the Fall-Winter-Spring-Summer cycle is the Dry-Rainy/Storm season.

We've entered the season of hurricanes, and every day by the afternoon the sky can no longer stand its own heat, and dark thunderheads form out of seeming nowhere, discharge an extreme and dangerous burst of rain and lightning, and then disperse. On most years, you can set your watch by them.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I think of our seasons as: winter, spring, summer, monsoon, autumn.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I guess you also live where dancinghorse does? I'm in Florida (which as mentioned above, is indeed only sunshiny when it's not fiercely clouded). We might have ugly flora, but at very least we get the most intensely beautiful skies.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Yeah, somewhat less than an hour up the road. :-)

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Another horse-writing-person-in-strange climates person! I shall read your journal, unless that's not okay. :)

[janni.livejournal.com]

Sure!

Judy's far more the horse person than I, though--I'm a dabbler who does the occasional ride, though I did write some horse books a few years back. :-)

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I just saw that... very cool! I'd ask you all sorts of questions (like do you still write YA), but poor dancinghorse is going to wonder who set up a tent and had a party on her entry while it was storming. *grin*

[larryhammer]

janni and I are in Tucson, dancinghorse is in Vail, a half hour south of us.

I call monsoons "high summer" myself.

---L.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I imagine the rain acts differently there than it does here... but I don't know enough about the flora in Arizona. The soil here has a high sand component, but we have a lot of vegetation, so we get severe run-off until it hits a line of very angry grass (I hear grass is friendly in other climates, but I can't imagine happy, soft grass!).

[larryhammer]

We're in desert thornscrub — some (tough) grasses, but more the flora rancheros invented chaps for: mesquite, ironwood, acacias, palo verde, all trees that thicket instead of forest; cacti by the barrel, prickly pear, cholla, & saguaro; greasewood, sage, brittlebrush in shades more grey than green; and on the flats, creosote by the square mile. Thorny, ornery flora that thanks you to mind your own business.

The ground is fine-grained, closer to clay than sand, with underneath it a layer of impervious calcination called cliche. When dust storms blow through, you will get grit in your house, for it is too fine to seal out. Water doesn't soak in but slides off, downhill to the washes — empty creekbeds that join to form empty riverbeds. Empty, that is, until it rains. Especially when rain comes an inch at a time in hour bursts.

---L.

[larryhammer]

We have two rainy seasons, btw: we're south enough to get the edge of Mexico's monsoon moisture in July & August, but also north enough to get Pacific winter storms December through May. The former are thunderboomers, while the latter are slower, lingering storms that leave rain in the valleys and snow on the mountains. Each season gives us five inches of rainfall, on average, though being close to an extreme climate, there's a high standard deviation.

Places that get average less than four inches of rain a year often get that in one lump every couple years. Now that's extreme.

---L.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Each season gives us five inches of rainfall, on average

Five inches?? Is that just for the season or all year?

[larryhammer]

Sorry. 5"/season, for 10-11" in the year. Desert-R-Us.

---L.

[windrose.livejournal.com]

I've never thought of Florida grass as angry, but it's definitely defensive. As a kid, I could never understand how my friends were able to run around barefoot in it all the time. It was too harsh on my tender little feet, and there were always things hidden in it, like fire ants and sand spurs.

I do miss the afternoon thunderboomers. Every afternoon at 4pm, WHAM! It was lovely.

[wolfshaman.livejournal.com]

If I had a stillsuit, I'd be starting to get clammy in it.
I loved this line but then I am a big Herbert fan.

Someday I will visit your area. It sounds wonderful to me. I love a big thunderstorm.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

8) I moved to Arrakis from Connecticut. It's a different world.

Monsoon storms are violent, and you can see them coming for miles. I've never seen lightning like what we have here. It leaps up and down from ground to cloud, and branches and mutates and takes over the whole sky.

[wolfshaman.livejournal.com]

I have seen some of the photographs from your area. Looks like it could be very scary stuff. As long as I am inside a nice sturdy house, it would be great to see.