HikeArizona.COM

The endless chatter of weather.

Some showers yesterday and today are a nice spring treat. Looks like tomorrow night into Sunday morning will bring the best chance for measurable rain. Even looks like a few inches of snow in the higher elevations, with levels to near 6000 feet

Models are saying up to an inch of liquid over parts of the Rim, http://www.hpc.ncep.no... and that would be impressive for late April. Much of that could be snow, too, I expect. However, we've seen before that models don't handle these out of the season storms, so I'd believe it when I see it. Too bad it isn't slightly further south, as it would be nice to see a decent 1" liquid equivalent of fresh wet snow on the Catalinas over 7,000' or 8,000'. Rincons, Santa Ritas, and Pinalenos, too. Not gonna happen.

Got to keep the bees happy

@rwstormYou and bees are probably good drinking buddies. Lots in common.

Aren't these spring systems that bring some quick rain or snow to Arizona the ones that often develop into huge tornado outbreaks in the midwest a few days later?

@chumley
you know it

In Arizona's northern provinces, Joel looks to be set to receive another major spring storm, with substantial heavy wet snow. Pike's ought to be green this year.

Some surprisingly impressive rain totals around Tucson, and both the Catalinas and Rincons, and Summerhaven General Store reports 3 inches of snow.

It's snowing again! Was supposed to be volunteering with the green mountain falls trail association getting the Dewey Mountain trail up and running, but it got cancelled. No free Pantry lunch.
5-8" inches forecast for tonight!

http://www.cograilway.com/Summit/summitcam.jpg

Should be more on the summit, there.

Snowbowl had 18" of powder over the weekend! Not bad for the last weekend in April. The peaks looked stunning from a hundred miles away. It was clearly melting fast at the lower elevations, but all the peaks around Flag still looked great yesterday afternoon. Kendrick, Sitgreaves, even the lower peaks like O'Leary, Saddle, and the Hochdeffers had snow on the north slopes!

chumley wrote:Snowbowl had 18" of powder over the weekend! Not bad for the last weekend in April. The peaks looked stunning from a hundred miles away. It was clearly melting fast at the lower elevations, but all the peaks around Flag still looked great yesterday afternoon.

Man, and you say I have super binocular vision to see the peaks from Pusch Peak ( I can't), but to see melting snow from 100 miles! Impressive!

Well if we're going to start listing the ways I'm superior to you, HAZ will crash processing all the data. ;)

You could always PM David Allen?

Getting hit with a monsoon-style thunderstorm in the east valley. Big wind, lightning and good rain. May 2nd. I didn't see that coming.

It sure tried to rain at the South Rim this afternoon, but didn't quite get there. It was pretty windy and cloudy but started calming and clearing at sunset, and the full moon came out.

3/4 inch in my rain gage this morning.

Anyone remember May of 2009? This year is starting to remind me of that year. Though it happened more towards the middle of the month, at least in Flag, we had a series of rain and thunderstorms that were widespread and the result of a few a-typical late season lows coming through the state. Sort of like this year. We ended up having a much cooler than normal June (Joe commented he didn't remember a June in the Valley so cool) and then we had a failure of the monsoon.

I say reminded because there were a lot of other things that happened that year to cause that. Namely, the emerging strong El Nino of 2009-2010, that gave us that pretty good winter. Also did California some good, too. The guy over at the CA Weatherblog keeps posting about the warming Pacific, but no mention of an El Nino, and even if one did happen to cause a 2015 North American Monsoon failure, it is still too far from Winter to know what would happen for the west coast and SW, with regard to snow and rain for 2015-2016.

Still, these thunderstorms and unusual May lows, from my experience in AZ & NM, for the last 9 years, are not too common. I will say that after the last two, and especially last year's supercharged monsoon season with tropical lows lasting well into October, I would be OK with a less than average monsoon performance. Not a failure, hopefully, but maybe some places getting more May precip, and perhaps then more like 75% of normal for most state locations from July to September. If we got massive rain and snow totals next winter, like 2010, that would be OK by me.

@johnlp
I was wondering where this rain came from, I want to say we got nearly an inch as well from central to west side, a few streets flooded

friendofThundergod wrote:I was wondering where this rain came from,

I'm not a weatherman, but I'm guessing, the sky. I'm sure the experts will chime in if I'm incorrect. Chums, Jim_H, Randy?