Living on Phoenix Time
Woman in the Middle | September 10, 2015Our neighbor to the east, the southern part of Arizona, has interesting summer weather. What we all think of as a desert actually has monsoon weather during the summer. I have experienced it and it is quite spectacular. Big thunderhead clouds gather and next thing you know there is thunder and lightning and then the heavens absolutely open up into a down pour. If you are driving in it you can’t see hardly anything, windshield wipers or not. If you happen to be out in it you will be soaked in no time.
A few months ago I read somewhere that, with global warming, we can expect to have this summer monsoon type of weather pattern here in Southern California. They made it sound like it was something we could expect in the future. They forgot to included the words “starting this summer” in their discussion.
It was another hot day yesterday. It got up to 106F. After a couple of days of this the house gets warmed up and it is hard to get it to cool down. Then we got the cloud cover rolling in. The clouds seem to trap the heat and the humidity really creeps up.
We seem to have better luck cooling off the garage on nights like that than the house. In the garage we can open up both the big garage door as well as the smaller side door and really get some cross ventilation going. That doesn’t seem to work in the house on nights we have higher humidity. It got down to all of 77 degrees in the house last night. Since I usually run the air at 78 or 79 on hot days, I anticipate it will kick on pretty early today. I feel like I am already living in Phoenix!
Just yesterday I was thinking this is Arizona’s weather, not ours! I was grocery shopping & as it was 106 out I left the windows down. I was in the bread aisle when a horrible pounding started on the roof! Rrain and strong wind The manager was ferrying people to their cars with an umbrella.. By the time my turn came my front seats were soaked.
Oh no! Where were you? It sure didn’t rain like that at my house. Isn’t that weird?
Yeah, yesterday it rained like crazy for maybe 10 minutes, and then it went back to being hot! Maybe we are seeing the beginning of this monsoon weather you are talking about.=-O
It didn’t rain hardly at all at my house, just a couple of drops.