[azbackpackr]

It seems to be showing up in spits and rumbles. Very scattered. Pretty dry here the past few days, but we just had some rumbles and a few minutes of heavy drops, then it was over. Hope it starts up soon, my garden needs it!

I hear it's sunny and dry in Flag--my daughter just called to say she hiked up Elden this afternoon.

[azdesertfather]

All I can say is, "HURRY UP AND GET TO PHOENIX, ALREADY!!!" 113+ this weekend, have mercy.

[azbackpackr]

Oh, you poor souls! Hope you have a pool! Now's the time to get the kayak out and practice your Eskimo rolls! Or swim lots of laps.

Speaking of pools, we have an old indoor pool here in Eagar that has been crumbling away, and this summer, what with the economy, the town council decided not to open it. (They bought property to build a new pool with grant money, hope they can do that within the next couple of years!) I had finally found someone up here to teach me the Eskimo Roll without having to drive to Phoenix and pay $50 an hour for lessons. So now the only other option is Lyman Lake, which is very dirty and yucky. Or one of the colder lakes.

[Al_HikesAZ]

It's not really a "monsoon". This term entered the Arizona lexicon in the late 1940's and early 1950's with military returning from Asia and Southeast Asia. These storms used to be called chubascos. I think they should still be called chubascos. It's just Media Cultural Imperialism that perverted these words. Let's return to our roots and traditions!!!!

[writelots]

We had our first traditional afternoon chubasco yesterday here in the old pueblo. Lightning, thunder, wind, huge rain drops and people wrecking their cars all over the place. It did my heart good. Almost an inch of rain at my place - and I'm downtown! I imagine the southeast side got good and wet!

[Jim_H]

According to Wiktionary: Chubasco Noun, Singular: chubasco, Plural: chubascos, (nautical) A violent squall with thunder and lightning, encountered during the rainy season along the Pacific coast of Central America and South America, a Chubasco in standard Spanish means any rain shower associated with heavy wind or, in nautical usage, a dark cloud which suddenly appears in the horizon, potentially foretelling rough sailing conditions.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chubasco

The monsoon name makes more sense since a monsoon is a seasonal wind shift. Most of the year we have a westerly wind. During the monsoon we get a southern and southeastern wind that bring moisture with it from Mexico to give us the storms. Its very similar to other monsoons of the world like the Indian Subcontinent Monsoon. A chubasco is just a Spanish word that could be applied to a violent storm at anytime of year and has no specific reference to the weather phenomenon that is the Monsoon.

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/fgz/science/monsoon.php?wfo=fgz

I see the radar has some light showers over the Springerville area and into the Gallup area. We are bone dry over here today, they are still saying we should expect a return to moisture by the weekend before we dry out again next week.

[joe bartels]

It's the season of the wind shift, not individual storms.

I keep wanting to call a Chubasco a Chewbacca. Hence the term it's ra... ah nevermind

[Al_HikesAZ]

Some of us are still fighting the Chubasco War

The monsoon war of 1978
03/11/2008 12:47 PM
Elaine Raines Arizona Daily Star
First they tried to change the name and now they want to change the start date. When will they learn, it’s not good to mess around with Arizona’s monsoon season.
The National Weather Service recently announced that it will no longer rely on dew point to determine the start of the monsoon season. Instead the season will start on June 15 and end on September 30. End of discussion, let the season begin.

Ah, but not so fast, change to our precious monsoons is not just about pronouncements. Tucsonans take this very seriously.

Back in the summer of 1978, Charles W. Polzer, a Jesuit priest and ethnohistorian at the Arizona State Museum, suggested that our summer rainstorms would best be described as chubasco. That was the Spanish word for a heavy, dark-clouded sky, high humidity, violent winds and erratic rains.

What his suggestion started was once referred to as the Chubasco War of 1978.

The Arizona Daily Star adopted the term chubasco, as did, at least, one local tv weathercaster. For many long-time Tucsonans, the word was nothing new. They had referred to the storms as chubascos all along. But for many others, the term did not exactly roll off the tongue.

There were letters to the editor. Polzer followed up his idea with an opinion piece in the paper. He explained the history of the word with its Portuguese and Latin roots.
At the start of the next summer, there was an editorial reminding readers that the seasonal rains were chubasco. When the floods and rains soon followed, the Star reported on the chubascos and their aftermath.

But within a year or two, chubascos faded away and the monsoons returned. So, they can try to tell us the monsoon season starts on some arbitrary date, but what do you want to bet everyone still watches the dew point!

Which method do you prefer for gauging the start of the monsoon season?
Dew point
June 15 each year
Don't care - it's just rain

Craig Childs in his book about water in the southwestern deserts "The Secret Knowledge of Water" refers to them as chubascos.

I suppose it doesn't help that Chubasco, Chewbacca and Tabasco are so close phonetically. I just hope we get rain.

[Jim_H]

The Spanish speakers who settled Tucson would have known nothing of a Monsoon if they didn't study the weather, so the name might fit, but it still isn't as descriptive as Monsoon. Why not call them Monsoon Chubascos?

Both Monsoon and Chubasco come through Portuguese who knew both.

Etymology and definition
The English monsoon came from Portuguese monção, ultimately from Arabic mawsim (موسم "season"), "perhaps partly via early modern Dutch monsun".[3] The Arabic-origin word mausam (मौसम, موسم) is also the word for "weather" in Hindi, Urdu, and several other North Indian languages.[4] The definition includes major wind systems that change direction seasonally.

So if a monsoon is a westerly wind, why do so many of our Arizona storms come from the southeast. Riddle me that one monsoon man.

I didn't create this post. I had a post here, but it was 90% different from what is written here.

[writelots]

From the National Weather Service Website on the North American Monsoon (http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/twc/monsoon/monsoon_NA.php)

Until the late 1970s, there was serious debate about whether a monsoon truly existed in North America. However, considerable research, which culminated in the Southwest Arizona Monsoon Project (SWAMP) in 1990 and 1993, established the fact that a bonafide monsoon, characterized by large-scale wind and rainfall shifts in the summer, develops over much of Mexico and the intermountain region of the U.S. Published papers at the time called this pattern by different names, including the "Summer Thunderstorm Season," "The Mexican Monsoon," "The Southwest Monsoon," and the "Arizona Monsoon."

The North American Monsoon is not as strong or persistent as its Indian counterpart, mainly because the Mexican Pleateau is not as high or as large as the Tibetan Plateau in Asia. However, the North American Monsoon shares most of the basic characteristics of its Indian counterpart.

That debate having been settled - lets all go play in the rain. I don' much care whatcha callit. Me likes summer rains!

[joe bartels]

Amen
Me too, I friggen love the summer desert deluge!

[Jim_H]

The Spanish speakers who settled Tucson would have known nothing of a Monsoon if they didn't study the weather, so the name might fit, but it still isn't as descriptive as Monsoon. Why not call them Monsoon Chubascos?

Both Monsoon and Chubasco come through Portuguese who knew both.

Etymology and definition
The English monsoon came from Portuguese monção, ultimately from Arabic mawsim (موسم "season"), "perhaps partly via early modern Dutch monsun".[3] The Arabic-origin word mausam (मौसम, موسم) is also the word for "weather" in Hindi, Urdu, and several other North Indian languages.[4] The definition includes major wind systems that change direction seasonally.

So if a monsoon is a westerly wind, why do so many of our Arizona storms come from the southeast. Riddle me that one monsoon man.

Whats going on with the post above that I quoted? I didn't write that, and I don't know who did, but it looks like I did write it. I had a post in that order, but it was different. Also, I didn't have the last sentence: "So if a monsoon is a westerly wind, why do so many of our Arizona storms come from the southeast. Riddle me that one monsoon man."

My post had something about Flagstaff storms not being very Chubasco like, and then the part about the Spanish in Tucson not knowing about the Monsoon unless they studied weather, but none of the other stuff.

In my post a few back I say the monsoon is a south to southeastern wind, not a westerly. The westerly winds are what we have most of the rest of the year. See the NWS page for more.

[joe bartels]

I quote Shaggy, wasn't me.
Bearass ol' Al...

[Al_HikesAZ]

Jhodlof is right. Ooops - my bad. I meant to quote you but it looks like my superpowers stepped all over you and replaced you instead of quoting you. I have to be really careful when I flex these superpowers. Won't happen again. I promise. I really really do.
Please forgive me. Or Joe will make me give back my HAZ cape and I won't be able to fight spammers anymore.

[Jim_H]

Well, I guess its not a big deal. its just nice to know what happened.

[RedRoxx44]

Since the heat in May, June, and July is already so intense, it would necessarily be quite unbearable during the hot season in August and September were the heat not moderated, in Sonora as in New Spain in general, by daily rains. Consequently, this season is called tiempo de aquas, or the rainy period. It begins in July and end in September. The rain is not continuous, but passes off in two or three hours. However, the precipitation is so heavy that brooks and rivers are extraordinarily swollen and are very dangerous to those who, because of pressing need or audacity, would cross them on horseback, for there are no bridges in this country. When the storm has ended, the rivers fall again as rapidly as they have risen, and the sky assumes it's former brightness. These rain showers are not general; at times they affect a stretch of but a few miles, over which the rain cloud empties itself, while the surrounding region remains completely dry. After the first heavy shower the heat is indescribable, so that at night as well as in the daytime one nearly suffocates. After some days, though, the air becomes cooled by repeated rains and the heat so moderated that it is quite bearable.

Ignaz Pfefferkorn, from Pimeria, 1756
from "Gila The Life and Death of an American River" by Gregory McNamee

[Jim_H]

Had two nice showers come through this morning by my cave. Other parts of town around Mt Elden and north towards the Peaks and beyond also had and are still getting rain. Don't know about the totals at my cave, but I estimate between 0.25 and 0.5 inches. Probably on the lower side since the rain was moderate to heavy but not much longer than 30 minutes total between the two storms. The airport report very little. Now its sunny and the sky is blue. This I like.

[azbackpackr]

It poured up near Greer (at the ranch where I work) last night, but not here in Eagar. We just got a few drops. When I arrived at work this morning there was ample evidence of the rain, though.

[Rob del Desierto]

Thought it was going to rain here today, but it all circled around us.

[azbackpackr]

Oh, forgot to say I found the discussion about the nomeclature regarding summer rains very interesting!

I was pretty astonished when I moved to Arizona from Hawaii in 1986 to find out about desert summer rain, because it almost never rains in San Diego, where I grew up, in summer. Not even in the county's mountains, although they may get an occasional thunderstorm in summer. I was also surprised to learn that the average annual precipitation for Tucson is greater than that of San Diego.