Yet another weather novelty for us is the monsoon. It is less strong than the ones in Asia apparently, but none the less, we have experienced a few things we hadn’t before. We saw an extended lightning storm without a drop of rain one night in June for instance:
We also experienced our first dust storm. It wasn’t strong enough to be visible, but we definitely knew it was there from the sudden drop in air quality. It passed quickly, but did inspire me to buy some breathing masks for my backpack in case it was worse and we were stuck outside. Apparently, the same weather patterns that trigger the heavier rains cause the haboobs. I had actually seen one previously when I briefly lived in Sydney, Australia, right before I met Chris.
As the West has actually been in a drought for a while, there has not been as much rain as there frequently would be during the monsoon season.The drought in the rest of the West isn’t as bad as it is in California, but there has been less rain than on average. Either way, about half of Arizona’s rainfall for the year typically happens between mid June and the end of September.
We had to get about a month into monsoon season before we even saw a proper downpour and there haven’t actually been that many days with a chance of rain so far. I think there have only been about a week and a half’s worth so far. At the time of writing, we have seen rain in Arizona a total of 8 times, three times during monsoon season and four times where it lasted more than a few minutes.
Now that we have experienced some of monsoon season, I have also found myself wondering how we would have fared in Florida. We have seen our first hit of humidity proper in Arizona. The temperatures and humidity during the parts of the monsoon season where there is actively some chance of rain are much more similar to Florida than what we have experienced in the previous 6 months in Arizona. 100s and 10-20% humidity are swapped for 50-60% humidity and the 80s and 90s. Florida was great fun, but at the time we were there, neither of us had experienced desert conditions properly and therefore had no point of comparison. We had also been through several horribly humid states that had far fewer pools and beaches than Florida immediately before it, which probably influenced our judgments.
Bleh
After acclimatizing to low humidity, I wonder if the rest of the world is going to feel like a swamp now as I did not enjoy the higher humidity of monsoon conditions. These humidity levels would have actually been on the low side for where we used to live in the UK and typical or worse in much of the US during the summer. Most of the year we’ve barely broken a sweat leaving the house other than when it was in the record breaking highs like 116-118, but even just walking the short distance to the leasing office to pick up a package was a bit oppressive. This makes me think that though Florida is lovely and easily still our favorite state in the East, I think Arizona was a better weather match.
Here’s the video:
PS – We have now been somewhere else, blogs to come on that soon. Italy and England both did feel very, very humid and cloudy compared to Arizona. Some of it was just poor weather luck in that upon arrival in both countries, in that it was partly sunny for the few evening hours of the first day, to be replaced with near complete cloud cover for the rest of the duration of our stays. That said, that wasn’t a big factor in the humidity. They just do have much more humid climates. I took so many showers in both places. I am enjoying being back in the hot and the dry. 🙂
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