News from the desert

[cactuswatcher]

It's officially summer. We've had temperatures above 110 F, and last night we had our first rain since mid April, a rousing thunderstorm in the middle of the night. It's all perfectly normal. It's monsoon season, hotter than blazes and welcome thunderstorms that come in from all points of the compass.

I got up and checked the radar loop on the net last night after the lightning passed. The storm was a fairly typical first monsoon storm coming from the southeast headed toward the northwest. The whole system is actually a huge patch of clear weather fringed with clouds and storms from here circling up into Utah and all the way to Nebraska (waving to ann1962). The local storms here are small and the Phoenix area is large. So not everyone 'in town' got rain last night. Hope you got some, soulfulspike80!

This year we have an extra little problem. A minor disaster at a power station means we'll probably be having short rolling blackouts during peak hours for the rest of the summer. We've been asked to conserve, but asking the average Joe to conserve (translation have his air conditioning set several degrees higher in the hottest part of the day) for months probably isn't realistic. Either the larger businesses will do most of it or the blackouts will certainly come. The power companies are promising they'll be short, but who knows at this point.

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I have had relatives in Tucson for decades. It's a little higher and cooler that Phoenix, but not much. The higher mountains there make for the best storm photos. Here I can tell the storms are about to arrive at my house when I can't see the mountains to the south. The monsoon storms are fun and little dangerous; lots of wind, dust and lightning, sometimes big hail, often flash floods, but no tornadoes, thank goodness.

I like the desert, but in summer, especially when it's over 110, it's hard to love it.