Monsoon Windstorms . . . No Power for Four Days (Climate Change)

The first pole north of Alvernon.
The one behind on the other side of River Road
is metal and gives a sense of scale.

As if moving wasn't stressful enough, we had two particularly powerful monsoon storms with gusts stronger than we had ever seen.

Weather is always big news. After the polite "How are you?" — which never intends or elicits a real answer — the most common subject of polite conversation has to be the weather. "Lovely weather, isn't it?" When the weather gets a bit extreme, some of us reflect upon climate.

We are only in our seventeenth year in the Old Pueblo. Witnesses who have spent a lifetime here tell us how monsoon season used to be regular afternoon downpour. Nowadays, the afternoon clouds still gather but only occasionally do we actually get rain. Rain here is typically preceded by a vanguard of strong winds. The two monsoon windstorms we experienced last month are beyond anything we have seen. We are getting less rain overall, but more extreme weather.

A utility pole torn into toothpicks.

We were driving back home to San Simeon on the afternoon of July 17th when the first one hit. There was a big traffic jam on eastbound Skyline Drive. The traffic lights at Campbell Avenue were dark. Power outage. An extremely busy intersection had become a four-way stop. After about a half an hour we got through to Sunrise Drive and saw a half mile of devastation: scores of huge palo verde and mesquite trees broken, some completely uprooted, even saguaros, bus stop benches and commercial pylon signs blown away, and standing street signs twisted and deformed.

The only way to get to our house is via Alvernon Way.* The Finger Rock Wash cuts across Alvernon just north and just south of our street. We tried crossing from the north, turned around, tried crossing from the south, and turned around. The wash was dangerously flooded. So we had dinner at the Tucson Racquet Club and a couple of hours later the flood had receded to become a shallow, debris laden stream. We drove across.

There were ten huge and old wooden poles along this part of Alvernon.
Only part of one was left standing.

We were relieved to find our house still had power, but trees were broken and uprotted all along the way. Not just scores along Sunrise, but hundreds in the Foothills neighborhoods.

Two weeks later, Friday the 28th, the second storm hit. Rain always gets us outside to stare and marvel, but the wind gusts and hail we saw that afternoon were something we had never seen before. At six that evening, the power went out.

Saguaros were broken in two.

The next morning, we drove around. Alvernon by San Simeon used to be lined by ten huge wooden utility poles with wires and cables that ran up the hill from River Road to supply electricity and internet to thousands of residences. The eleventh is a huge metal pole. It remained standing. The ten old wooden poles had all snapped like toothpicks.

We had four days without power. By the first and second day Tucson Electric had restored power to all but thirty-one customers, the thirty-one clustered around our San Simeon Drive where we live at the dead end. We were in the dark until Tuesday afternoon.

At the top of the hill,
the metal utility pole stood its ground.

Inconvenient? People in the neighborhood fled to hotels, stayed with friends, and borrowed generators to keep refrigerators operating. Inconvenient? We are trying to move to our new house as quickly as reasonably possible so we can sell the old. Hell yes, inconvenient. We took a couple of pads and our small television to Dove Mountain and camped on the floor. Thank goodness we already had internet installed.

I read that this year is the hottest in recorded history, courtesy of modern life and our addiction to burning things for fuel. Regardless of the impact on climate, we as a society are unwilling to make changes. We are propelled by "freedom," the profit motive, and vested interests that buy politicians. We are a ship of fools.

Four days later, ten new metal poles.
The cable lines left dangling with a piece of the old wooden pole.

 

 

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* Alvernon sounds very Spanish, but it isn't. No one really knows the origin but there was an Al Vernon working for the developer of these parts.

Peenix Haboob

Another reason not to live in Peenix (there are several) is the weather.

During monsoon season, our state capital sprawl of MAGA nutters gets haboobs: walls of dust blown by powerful winds. The area south of Phoenix is farmland. Lots of cotton. Brush has been plowed up to make nice, exposed soil that is just waiting for 70 m.p.h. winds to blow north into the Phoenix megalopolis.

A haboob blew into south of Phoenix (Chandler) on Friday afternoon, September 2, just as Shari's flight from Everett made its approach to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, Terminal 3.

Here is some video local media took of the great wall of dust. It's what Shari could see from the airplane.

Fortunately, by the time we collected luggage and found our way out the very confusing and congested Sky Harbor airport, the haboob had blown over.  Good thing because the visibility in a haboob is so bad the only safe thing to do is drive way off the road and turn off your lights so no other car is tempted to follow your lead and rear-end you.

We have a nice new Ford Explorer and its lights stay on for several minutes after you turn off the engine. It's a convenience that could get someone killed.

Rain Was Not in the Forecast

On Thursday the 10-day forecast was for little chance of rain, a sad forecast because we get three-quarters of our annual rainfall this time of year. Monsoon season.

But Mother Nature had different plans. She dumped some inch and a half of rain within an hour. Some places not that far away got over two inches. Over that one-hour period, the temperature dropped from 103° to 73°.

We had never seen so much rain falling over the edge of the roof.

Caesalpinia

 Or, The Effect of Monsoon Rain on Life. 

In this case, on Caesalpinia pulcherrima. In the Sonoran Desert, we call the legume plant with spectacular flowers, Mexican bird of paradise. Its common names include peacock flower and in Bermuda, where it is the national flower, the pride of Bermuda.

Anyway, our winter and spring rainfall having been almost non-existent, our Caesalpinia was sparse and struggling. Then came July, then August, and we are not done with September. Tucson's rainfall already this year has exceeded its annual average.

Nature responded. Our Caesalpinia is a flowering jungle, and the unusually plentiful butterflies and moths are feasting upon the flowers.

The River Flows

Weather is in the news all around the world. Much of it is pretty dire.

It's been a while, but so far the monsoon season this year has brought us rain pretty much every day this July, and the forecast is more of the same.

We had a trace all through June. Here in the Foothills for July, we are at around three to four inches.

The monsoon bust last year, coupled with a wildfire in the Catalinas, make us appreciate the rain. We could not be more ecstatic.

These days remind us why it's called the Rillito River. Can you hear the Colorado River toads croaking?

The Creek Flows

When we get rain in the Sonoran Desert, we get excited. When we get monsoon rain, I grab my video camera.

The first monsoon deluge is always a welcome relief after weeks and weeks of dry summer weather with daily three-digit high temperatures (38+C.).

This deluge was particularly welcome. Some months ago I uncovered and opened up four culverts under the driveway. They had been blocked for as long as we have lived here. When we had heavy rains, a large lake formed on the north side of the driveway. My plan was to restore the creek flowing from the roof of the house down into the gully on the south side of the driveway, into Coat Hanger Valley.

The plan worked.

Extreme Weather Warning

I'm organizing photos on my computer and a pop-up pops up. It's a winter weather warning for my area, Baja Arizona. The threat is rain.

True, we had about an inch over the last weekend. Ground is still damp after a few days of sunshine. The forecast is for a few days of rain. Apparently, that's cause for a warning interruption.

We do get rain in the winter. It also gets cold. It's about 56F now, about the same as the water in the swimming pool in which I just dipped. It will get into the low forties late in the night. That's cold for us, but it's not like anything to worry about.

It's fantasy news. Some idiot program, written by some profit-oriented business, hypes reality for the sake of visibility. Winter rain is seasonal. No one needs a warning. If one is doing something for which the weather is relevant, one looks it up. Otherwise, winter rain will not kill you. But news and weather are business. So this idiot program interrupts my computer to warn me about winter weather.

Hundred Degrees

Yesterday was the first hundred degree day in Tucson this year. The day the thermometer hits 100°F is an occasion for articles in local newspapers and news broadcasts. Local TV stations have competitions to see who can guess which day will be the first. It's a summer time rite of passage, like Memorial Day, barbecues, and (in other parts of the country) shorts and flip-flops.

Well, today the thermometer in our cement pond hit 100°F, so we ain't taking a back seat to nobody.

Winter

The subtitle to this blog is Life in the Sonoran Desert. This is an update.

We're not used to the cold. We were spoiled last winter because it froze only once, maybe twice, and that was in late November. This winter we've been covering sensitive plants with white sheets so often the garden looks like a Ku Klux Klan hang-out. We watch 10-day forecasts regularly, subtracting a few degrees from the predicted downtown lows to account for our elevation and location near a major wash. 

At least El Niño has brought lots of snow in the Catalinas and ground-soaking rain below. We got enough rain by the 7th to account for the January average and the Rillito River flowed for almost two weeks. We even have had several overcast days.

The blood thins as you get used to the Sonoran Desert. After weeks of monsoon heat and sleeping without covers, we now have a thick duvet on our bed, usually supplemented with a blanket. A space heater is on low in the bathroom to take the edge off the cold tiles. We wear fuzzy mukluk boots, hiking pullovers and throw blankets as we sip our morning coffee. Our closets are bulging with long sleeves, polypropylene, heavy pajamas, overcoats and wool.

I like to joke that if you don't like the weather here, wait a few hours. It also works for our five seasons. A few weeks, a couple of months, and it's a different climate. I'm ready for spring.

Rain in the Old Pueblo

"Just think," says Shari to me at six in the morning. "If we were in the Northwest, it would be like this every day."

Well, not every day, but the point was well understood.

It started raining at about four-thirty. Lightening lit up our dark bedroom. The sound of torrential rain followed thunder. Three hours later, it's still raining. The sky is overcast, it's cold, and our moods are a trifle grey.

"Think of the energy you are saving not having to mow lawns." Once again, Shari was right.

Snow & Fog

Pope Greg's Eve passed without a blog comment, but not because it was dull. It snowed that night which, by itself, is a noteworthy occurrence in the Old Pueblo.

You do know Pope Greg's Eve, don't you? Even before the Eve was overcome by champagne vintners, big band parties, and the Times Square ball drop, and the day by college bowl games, January 1 was the feast day of Pope Greg who slew the pagan Julian calendar.

The snow settled only where the warmer ground didn't melt the ice, but folks in the city were talking about it for days.

This morning, the sky was getting lighter as I sipped my coffee and checked the weather on my tablet. Odd, isn't it, that we check the weather on the computer instead of going outside and experiencing it? It's like looking at your watch to decide whether you are hungry. Anyway, there was a weather advisory posted for Tucson.

Too curious to pass up, I touched the link and up popped up the warning: fog advisory.

About twenty minutes earlier, when it was still dark, I had looked out the bedroom window at the neighbor's driveway floodlight. It was clear.

I read the advisory with some disbelief, but went to the dining room window and opened the shutters. The entire Tucson basin was socked in. Cool.

Thinking it was only in the lower elevations, I checked the north side, towards the neighbor with the floodlight. It was socked in. Couldn't see past the first neighbor, much less the Catalina foothills or mountains. Very cool.

Walking Nazar down our street, I felt like I was in Lower Alaska where cold, damp, fog is a regular occurrence and a normal feeling. Here in the Sonoran Desert, it's maybe once a year.

Rillito River Flows

Not often, but there are a few days when the Rillito is a river and not a dry wash.

We've had a good monsoon season in terms of rainfall. October is pretty late for monsoon rain, but we got a bonus last week, about an inch and a half over two days, courtesy of Hurricane Simon.

The Rillito River flowed. The Santa Cruz River flowed. The water around our back doors flowed, and with the help of a large shop broom, was swept to the West.

Everything was wet, glistening with water. The earth is saturated with the wet. The desert squishes as you step on it. You feel like you don't want to step on it. The heavy rain makes beautiful patterns on fine dirt, exposing pebbles to create a rich, living texture. 

The Tucson basin is green, and the vegetation is so happy that some trees and shrubs are flowering — again.

Welcome Rain

It already has been a pretty good monsoon season with decent rainfall. Now we are getting even more, and it's quite late in the season.

Here are some snaps of San Simeon with grey skies and drizzle.

My thanks to Judy's greed for the blog. I'm always happy to remind her that she and Ray did buy their retirement house in Tucson. All they need do now is retire.

Should I mention that the swimming pool temperature is well over ninety degrees? Probably not.

C'mon down. We'll leave the lights on.

Monsoon Rain - New Growth

We've had something like one to two inches of rain over this last week. Down the hill a rain gauge reports an inch; up the hill another rain gauge reports two and a third inches.

Rain is like that here. Go a few blocks and it can be very different. Check out the Arizona rainlog website.

One can tell the plants are happy. And there are surprises and miracles.

So I'm pulling the recently emptied recycling container back from the street and notice a pin cushion cactus by the side of the driveway. It's in full bloom. It all happened overnight. Pin cushions are tiny cacti, as you can see from the ruler posing next to it.

I had to take a photo and share the beauty of these tiny little plants that like to hide in the shade of sagebrush.

Other vegetative responses are more common, but no less miraculous. There are palo verde seedlings everywhere. What is amazing about the sprouts is how they move the dirt around them. I would need time-lapse photography to capture the movement, but each seedling has pushed dirt and small pebbles aside to create a little depression around itself.

How do they do that? Plants aren't supposed to move like that, are they?

The Desert Smells Like Rain

 Rain.

The shock of humid air and the smell of the first wet after weeks of summer heat are among the most exhilarating and dramatic sensations in the Sonoran Desert.

We've had three-digit highs and clear skies for weeks. Wednesday night it rained enough that everything smelled heavily moist on Thursday morning. More clouds gathered in the afternoon and the desert got a decent drenching.

It's like a blessing. It's like an incredible act of kindness.

I've been on a weekly schedule of watering plants and trees. I feel responsible for anything I've planted or transplanted, and it's taken some time for me to realize that the bigger agaves, palo verdes, acacias, and even eucalyptus need occasional water to thrive. "There's not a plant in the desert that doesn't like water once a week," said the nurseryman down the street who has a gardening talk show on the radio.

It's one thing to try to flood the roots of a plant with a garden hose. It's another when Nature floods the landscape.

It's an amazing display of generosity. Rain falling everywhere — on ornamentals and weeds alike; petunias, sage, creosote, and saguaro.

Snow in Tucson

That big winter storm from Alaska that's sweeping across the Midwest had its effect on Baja Arizona yesterday.

Yesterday's low in Tucson itself -- a smidgeon warmer than us in the Foothills -- was 33 degrees with a high of 52. More impressive, we got about a third of an inch of precipitation, much of it in the form of wet snow.

Where we live, local rainloggers logged over a half an inch.

We spent yesterday in a gray snow-clouds, but as I like to say, if you don't like the weather here, wait a few hours.

It's still early morning and the clouds over the Santa Catalina Mountains are just beginning to clear. The big payoff is seeing sunlight playing over the snow-clad mountains.

For local skiers, the pay-off is skiing on top of Mount Lemmon (9157 feet elevation) or, as the Tohona O'odham call it, Frog Mountain (Babad Doʼag). It's the summit of the Catalinas. There's a chairlift there among the aspens, but the slope really only merits a rope tow.

It will take a few days for all the snow to melt. The forecast is for increasingly warmer and sunnier days -- today some clouds; then all clear by mañana.

The nearby Rillito River should be flowing with the runoff. It's not like monsoon rains when we can get several inches of wet in a day, but there will be a pretty decent flow moving debris towards the Santa Cruz River (the main river by which Tucson was founded) and helping replenish our underground aquifers.

All in all, very nice weather for us -- it's the ornamental plants and trees that can't take frost that take a beating.

Winter

Well, I suppose it is a desert. It's not only hot, it's also cold. Come the cold of winter and we forget the heat of summer. Plus we get thirty or more degrees difference between daily highs and lows. By comparison, Seattle can be as low as eight.

We just got through some five nights of freezing weather. When it's thirty or twenty-eight degrees in "Tucson" (that mythical place designated by weather bureaus, usually near airports), it's several degrees colder a few hundred feet higher in elevation here in the Foothills. Plus, if you are near a wash, the temperatures drop even more from the cold air pushed down from the Catalina Mountains. So we've had a series of early mornings in the very low twenties.

Last year, 2012, overall was the warmest year on record in Tucson. We had forgotten about warm socks, thick pants, polypropylene sweaters, coats, and wool clothing. Come winter, we remember why we have such things. It's the swimming pool that seems out of place. It's down to 46 degrees. I have to do a polar bear dip -- just to say I did it.

The goldfish pond was covered with ice. Fish are fine.

We are more prepared than a couple of winters ago when it got down to seventeen and our palm trees lost their leaves. That winter, irrigation water lines burst around three faucets. This winter, I used a trick suggested by our good neighbor Denard -- put a trouble-light with an incandescent, soon-to-be-outlawed, heat-generating light bulb near the exposed water pipes, cover it with cloth, and leave the light on overnight. Plus we covered the plants that are more susceptible to frost. The one citrus tree we have is still small enough to cover, as is the Mexican salvia and our potted geranium and petunia collection.

Wednesday morning was the last of this stretch of freezing. The ten-day forecast has no freezing, and highs will be in the seventies. I took off the sheets yesterday afternoon. My god that was exhilarating to be outside in warmth. After highs reaching only the mid-forties, it got up to sixty. It was still a bright blue sky, but the iced chill was gone.

Citrus leaves are curled, plumeria doesn't like frost even if covered, and the Moses-in-the-cradle is almost as frost-intolerant, but the other covered plants did okay. Some we should have covered -- jade plant (duh) and a South African succulent should have been covered. They look wilted, but I'm hopeful.

The leaves on the two queen palm trees, way too high up to attempt a cover, are also shriveled, but I think they will survive. Queen palms are readily available at local nurseries, often on sale, but they don't tolerate the freezing we get in the Sonoran desert -- better to chose the California palm. Our two queens were planted a long time ago, and we almost lost them a couple of winters ago. They still haven't grown the lush foliage that they have in photos from before the Great Freeze. Smaller queens in the neighborhood didn't do so well.

We're still wearing mukluk boots and wool throws in the morning, and the air-conditioning system is still working in the "heat" direction, but layers get shed as the sun ascends. Snowbirds will be seen wearings shorts and T-shirts in the Safeway parking lot, but year-around locals like us have developed thinner blood. We'll still wear long sleeves.

I should take my polar bear dip before the swimming pool warms up.

Autumn on Its Way

It was in the low sixties this morning as we took our two furry children down the street for their morning walk. With a chill in the air, this was the first time I have worn jeans and a thin cardigan since early spring.  Like March. Jasmine is frisky. We think she likes the chill.

Dress is changing, at least at night when it's colder. Now I remember why I still have jeans and cardigans.  All these will be forgotten each day as the sun gets higher in the sky. We are expecting 99 degrees today and 100 tomorrow. But the evenings, nights and especially early mornings have a slight chill to them.

Did anyone see that full moon? Gorgeous. And in the early morning, if I stick my head outside and look up, the pre-sunrise sunlight has obscured every star in the sky except for two bright objects, Venus and Jupiter.

The Fifth Season

A headline today reports the hot weather the country has been experiencing.  NOAA is quoted, "Most of the contiguous U.S. was record and near-record warm for the six-month period, except the Pacific Northwest."

Except for the Pacific Northwest?  Sorry about that, Lower Alaska. 

As for Baja Arizona, it's nor-mal. We just call it the summer and monsoon seasons.

See, we have the usual seasons: autumn, winter, spring and summer. But we add a fifth season, monsoon.

Just when I thought the dry heat was getting to much, it turns into the Wet. The change is dramatic. There are clouds in the sky, lightning in the afternoons, and even rain. Evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) have little effect and the A/C keeps the cool. It stays warm at night because the clouds and humidity hold the heat.

The desert smells different. Especially when it rains, the fragrance of the creosote bush is spectacular. New green growth appears on some plants, like the ocotillo which can shed and grow leaves several times a year, and some plants have learned to take advantage of the Wet and flower this time of year.

Bugs, like beetles the size of a small bat, come out that haven't been seen in a year. And worth a separate blog, frogs and toads appear like they have been transported from a different planet.

Most of the world has four seasons, but I wonder if Vivaldi lived in Baja Arizona, would the Four Seasons be the Five Seasons? If Beethoven knew the desert monsoon, would the fourth movements of his Pastorale Symphony have even more thunder and lightning?

Hail (as in Ice Rain)

That front that passed through on the last day of winter brought rain and hail to Tucson, about a half an inch of precipitation. We got the jet stream from Seattle, I swear. And a hearty thank you.

It was our small taste of winter in what has been a very mild season.  No rain is unappreciated in this part of the world.

We had two days of rain, wind and occasional hail. It's only a memory now. We are in spring and temperatures reach the eighties this week, maybe even ninety on Saturday.

Shucks, the cement pond is up to seventy-two and I've been dipping for weeks now.