A dry season for Yuma:
Monsoon rain total falls below average
Despite an afternoon storm at the beginning of September that caused power outages and damage to some local businesses, the Southwest waved goodbye to a relatively dry monsoon season this weekend as it welcomed October.
The average rainfall for monsoon season in Yuma is 1.3 inches. This year, the local rainfall during the monsoon season, which lasts from about late June to the end of September, totaled .54 inches
“Monsoon, the word itself means a switch in the wind direction,” said Mark O’Malley, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Phoenix. “During late June the wind in the atmosphere switches directions from the west to the south and east. In the winter, the west winds bring in storms from the Pacific. In the summer during the monsoon season, moisture comes up with the south and east winds and produce thunder storms. It happens in parts of the state on nearly a daily basis.”
Daily rain or storms are definitely not the case for Yuma, however. This year the paltry rainfall made this the 80th driest season in the area since records began being kept 141 years ago, O’Malley noted.
“It’s toward the dry side but you’ve had a lot drier,” he said. “There have been multiple years where only a trace of rain fell during the monsoon season, the last being 2004. There have been years where it has essentially not rained there during the summer.”
O’Malley explained that a trace of rain is where rainfall is just enough to wet the ground, but not enough to measure.
The meteorologist with the NWS in Phoenix said while it’s hard to tell whether Yuma experienced the driest monsoon season across the state — due to the fact that there are not many observations in sparsely populated areas — it is not uncommon for the Southwest to have a dry season.
“Yuma is one of the driest parts of the state,” O’Malley said. “The southwest corner of Arizona was the driest part of the state and that is very typical for the entire year for that matter.
“In general the entire state as a
whole has been under a drought for about 20 years now,” O’Malley added. “The past couple of years the Southwest has received the least amount of help (with rain) compared to the rest of the state.”
O’Malley said the dry seasons occur with the “luck of draw as far as how
the weather patterns set up.”
“Every year, Yuma only sees a few days of rain to begin with,” he stated. “Being that the Southwest typically sees less rainfall anyways, once you get in a drought it’s a lot more difficult to get out of drought.”
It has been over a century since Yuma has seen
a relatively heavy amount of rainfall for the monsoon season, with the highest rain total on record, 7.22 inches, occurring in 1909.
Some Yumans may be likely to remember the monsoon season of 1989, however, which brought in the most recent, highest total of rainfall at 5.99 inches.