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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

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?

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.

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.

unknown author wrote:

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.