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Despite massive monsoon, this season is shaping up to look like another non-soon for Phoenix

A wall a dust rolls into the Valley on Aug. 25, 2025.
Carol Harvey/KJZZ
A wall a dust rolls into the Valley on Aug. 25, 2025.

Summer is still shaping up to be one big non-soon, despite the massive monsoon storm that rolled through the Valley on Monday night.

Sean Benedict is a lead meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Phoenix. He says the monsoon still happens but the season in the Valley has changed.

"It's a large regional impact. So it still develops every year and areas do still see active weather and above normal rainfall. It just seems like our area, in the lower deserts of South Central Arizona, yeah, we haven’t been seeing too much," Benedict said.

The last storm to affect most of the Phoenix area was on July 2, says Benedict, when Sky Harbor saw 0.16 inches of rain. He says that was also the rainfall total for the month of July.

Meanwhile, dust and high winds brought the airport to a halt at one point, but the storm didn’t bring much rain — at least to Sky Harbor.

"The thing is, a lot of these storms were continuously moving. You got those strong winds and a good push, so that can limit your rainfall totals. There still was very heavy rain around the area," Benedict said.

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KJZZ senior field correspondent Kathy Ritchie has 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local media outlets — nearly a decade of it has been spent in public media.
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