Soon, the Monsoon
Jun. 21st, 2004 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancinghorseToday 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:49 am (UTC)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. :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:47 am (UTC)I call monsoons "high summer" myself.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 10:08 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 10:13 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 10:50 am (UTC)Five inches?? Is that just for the season or all year?
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 11:15 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 12:58 pm (UTC)I do miss the afternoon thunderboomers. Every afternoon at 4pm, WHAM! It was lovely.