Lovin' The Desert!

The weather has begun to prove it's diversity here in Phoenix. While we have been in the Monsoon for just over 2 months now, it has shown very little of what I thought would be seen during a Monsoon. But, as weather is common to do, things change. Here is a glimpse of what happened Tuesday night.

A series of radar images starting at 6:27pm local (0127z) through 8:36pm (0336Z). In the first image I tried to point out about where we live, since it is in the middle of some of the "mess". Needless to say, it rained pretty good for a couple hours! I don't have an official rain gage at my apartment but in a gallon jug we had outside empty there is a good 2 inches of water in it.

Here is a map of some of the Local Storm Reports (LSR) received at NWS Phoenix on Tuesday evening, graphically. If you notice the two cloud icons with rain coming out between Guadalupe and Chandler, this is the area we live, just south of Guadlupe. These icons represent reports of 1.17 and 1.30 inches of rain that fell in about an hour or less that evening. This is pretty representative of what I witnessed at our apartment. Out near Apache Junction there were reports of over 3.30 inches of rain! The East Valley got quite a bit of rain, way to go Monsoon! There were quite a lot of reports of trees down and thunderstorm damage. Some areas were likely to experience fairly heavy downbursts.

News article from FOX 10 Phoenix about Tuesday August 17th Storms.

Here are some shots I took on August 15th of the last bit of a dust storm that was South of Phoenix. After I got off of work I drove down through Tempe and tried to see some of it. You could see it better than I could photograph it. The only real way to see any dust was to use lights. And I also had some fun with the timer on my camera :)