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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From Flagstaff, Darren McCollum with the National Weather Service said the start of meteorological winter comes with a short term period of dry and cooler weather.
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A team of researchers has been studying meteorological and air quality data collected during the 189 dust storms we’ve experienced in Phoenix since 2010. Based on that analysis, they recently unveiled the "Phoenix Dust Scale," a ranking system to assess the severity of dust storms.
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A team of 22 meteorologists and weather experts spent years developing the first standardized dust storm scale. It's designed to classify severity, like the Enhanced Fujita scale that's used for categorizing tornadoes.
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The city of Flagstaff is having one of the wettest starts to the water year on record, according to the National Weather service. A water year is a yearlong measurement of surface-water supply.
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Thanksgiving in Phoenix is much hotter than it used to be. In fact, Climate Central reports November temperatures in the Valley have risen faster than just about anywhere else in the country.