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So-called monsoons and... oh, wait, is that a haboob? Where'd the sun go!?
I have been known to joke that Arizona's claim to have a monsoon season is a joke. Or one of those marketing lies like when early settlers called the not-so-green Greenland, Greenland in order to attract more settlers. "You're going to call this place Barrenland, Carl? Who's going to move to Barrenland to raise a family. Call it... Greenland! No, no it's not a lie Carl, it's spinning the message. Carl, put the ax down Carl..."
Er. Where was I? Oh yeah. Arizona and its claim to have a monsoon season. You know who has a monsoon season? South Asia has a monsoon season. According to (the always accurate) Wikipedia the "drier lowland regions" of Kerala, India receive "only 1,250 mm" of precipitation on average. That's just a touch shy of 50 inches of rain a year. In the "drier" part of the state of Kerala. I recall catching a National Geographic special on TV mentioning a place where they gave how many feet of rain a place in India was receiving in a day during monsoon season. It was receiving more feet of rain in a day than Arizona gets inches of rain in a wet year.
Okay, okay, so you want to delve into definitions and point out that monsoons are officially defined not as a season with super heavy rainfall put by, "a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation" (once again from the Font of All Knowledge's page on monsoons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon). But you and I know that when you say monsoon people think, "heavy rainfall." Thus why I say that it is a joke for Arizona to talk of a monsoon season. We're a desert. A place that receives very little precipitation. NOAA has a table of precipitation in Phoenix from 1896 through 2009 (http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/psr/climate/climatetable.php?wfo=psr&month=All&parm=MonthlyPcpn&site=PHX). Know what the yearly average is? Seven and a half inches. Not seven and a half feet. Inches. Less than two thirds of a foot. About a fifth of a meter for the sensible parts of the world that have gone metric.
But you know what? Arizona has borrowed another foreign weather related word. Haboob. It's basically Arabic for, "It's the end of the world! Oh, wait. Never mind, it's just a miles and miles long wall of dust." We got one here in the Phoenix area the other day. Want to see it? Fortunately someone else had a camera and they posted a picture to Flickr. Haboob over Phoenix Arizona. Check that description, "A massive dust storm called a haboob hit Phoenix, AZ in the evening of July 5, 2011. It was over a mile tall and 30-50 miles wide." Forget a mile tall, check out that width. It didn't hit Phoenix. It hit Mesa, and Tempe, and Scottsdale, and Phoenix, and Guadalupe... You know, how about we just say it hit the whole thing. If a city was vaguely in the vicinity of Phoenix, it got hit.
So why write all this?
Guess who was on the road when it hit. Oh. For extra credit, guess who doesn't have functioning windshield wash sprayers. Sure, the dust alone wasn't a big problem (if you don't mind visibility dropping at times to 10-20 feet). But when it first started to rain it was a bare sprinkling that didn't do anything more than make the dust stick.
So yeah. The TL;DR version. Monsoon season in Arizona is a joke, but oh lord are the haboobs real.
Er. Where was I? Oh yeah. Arizona and its claim to have a monsoon season. You know who has a monsoon season? South Asia has a monsoon season. According to (the always accurate) Wikipedia the "drier lowland regions" of Kerala, India receive "only 1,250 mm" of precipitation on average. That's just a touch shy of 50 inches of rain a year. In the "drier" part of the state of Kerala. I recall catching a National Geographic special on TV mentioning a place where they gave how many feet of rain a place in India was receiving in a day during monsoon season. It was receiving more feet of rain in a day than Arizona gets inches of rain in a wet year.
Okay, okay, so you want to delve into definitions and point out that monsoons are officially defined not as a season with super heavy rainfall put by, "a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation" (once again from the Font of All Knowledge's page on monsoons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon). But you and I know that when you say monsoon people think, "heavy rainfall." Thus why I say that it is a joke for Arizona to talk of a monsoon season. We're a desert. A place that receives very little precipitation. NOAA has a table of precipitation in Phoenix from 1896 through 2009 (http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/psr/climate/climatetable.php?wfo=psr&month=All&parm=MonthlyPcpn&site=PHX). Know what the yearly average is? Seven and a half inches. Not seven and a half feet. Inches. Less than two thirds of a foot. About a fifth of a meter for the sensible parts of the world that have gone metric.
But you know what? Arizona has borrowed another foreign weather related word. Haboob. It's basically Arabic for, "It's the end of the world! Oh, wait. Never mind, it's just a miles and miles long wall of dust." We got one here in the Phoenix area the other day. Want to see it? Fortunately someone else had a camera and they posted a picture to Flickr. Haboob over Phoenix Arizona. Check that description, "A massive dust storm called a haboob hit Phoenix, AZ in the evening of July 5, 2011. It was over a mile tall and 30-50 miles wide." Forget a mile tall, check out that width. It didn't hit Phoenix. It hit Mesa, and Tempe, and Scottsdale, and Phoenix, and Guadalupe... You know, how about we just say it hit the whole thing. If a city was vaguely in the vicinity of Phoenix, it got hit.
So why write all this?
Guess who was on the road when it hit. Oh. For extra credit, guess who doesn't have functioning windshield wash sprayers. Sure, the dust alone wasn't a big problem (if you don't mind visibility dropping at times to 10-20 feet). But when it first started to rain it was a bare sprinkling that didn't do anything more than make the dust stick.
So yeah. The TL;DR version. Monsoon season in Arizona is a joke, but oh lord are the haboobs real.