Arjun Heimsath, a professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, said that soil becomes hydrophobic as the heat dries it out. Those higher peaks in rain bring other environmental dangers.ĭr. In 2014, the city received 6.34 inches, its most since 1984. Last year provided the second-most rainy days on record in Phoenix. There are fewer rainy seasons, but the ones Arizona gets have brought a lot of precipitation. “We’ll have higher peaks in terms of temperatures, we may even have higher peaks in terms of rainfall, but on average, it is getting drier and that’s driven in part by the temperature.” “We will continue to have variability just as we have in the past, but it’s variability around a long-term trend, rather than just variability around something normal,” Jacobs said. That doesn’t only include heat, but storms when they occur. Jacobs said the hotter weather caused largely by greenhouse gas emissions leads to more water evaporating from the soil and plants, amplifying the drought and contributing to weather extremes. The state’s temperature has risen 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, according to the NOAA. #azwx /i0l4gn0P9bĪrizona and the American southwest are getting hotter and drier as a result of climate change, instructed Jacobs. Good opportunity to add more later this week. Much of AZ is doing very well however as is common during monsoon season, there are still a few pockets lagging behind normal. Just about halfway through #Monsoon2022 and not unusual to see a wide disparity in rainfall. So we are able to get some short-term relief but when we’re looking at that long-term drought aspect, year after year after year we’re not getting as much precipitation as we should.” “We had a good wet December and then everything else was fairly dry across the state. “We did experience some short term drought mitigation last year … It alleviated some of that really extreme and exceptional drought,” Saffell said. Last year, Arizona’s monsoon season involved 4.20 inches falling at Phoenix Sky Harbor, the wettest summer since 2014. She also said monsoons depress the need for water agriculturally and municipally, which eases the burden on the state’s lowering water supply. It’s a vital phenomenon for the ecosystem, as Katharine Jacobs, the director for the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona, pointed out that summer is when streams, rivers, trees and wildlife need the rain most. More than half of southern Arizona’s annual rainfall comes during the summer months, according to the NOAA. And so that’s going to take a little bit longer than one or two years of really wet years, wet winters and wet summers.” “We have to make up for that mound of deficit. “What I usually try to bring forward is that we’ve had a period on record of 25-26 years and we’ve had only maybe six or seven wet years,” Saffell said. The city’s monsoon precipitation hit a record low in 2020 when 1 inch of rain fell. In Phoenix, where the average is 4.23 inches according to the National Weather Service, there were two wet summers from 2000-2009 and three of four monsoon seasons from 2017-2020 were drier than normal. Looking at five-year periods since 2000, only 2010-14 resulted in above-average rainfall. Storm takes out power to nearly 6,000 metro Phoenix residents, delays Southwest flightsĪverage precipitation in Arizona during monsoon months is 5.3 inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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