Zack Guido, an assistant professor at University of Arizona, leads the Southwest Monsoon Fantasy Forecasts, which is happening for the fifth time this year.
Monsoons are celebrated in the southwest — which, Guido likes to say, is a bit unusual. Typically wild weather is not a good thing. But for the most part, monsoons are welcome — they bring rain and lower temperatures, and help control wildfires.
Monday, June 30, is the last day to get in on the action for July’s monsoon forecast. It’s inspired by fantasy baseball leagues and March Madness. Guido joined The Show to talk about how it all works.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: So, let's just talk first in a practical sense about how this contest works. Let's say somebody's listening to this, they want to get in on it. What do they do?
ZACK GUIDO: Right, well, you can go online if you just Google search “monsoon fantasy forecast,” you'll likely find us. And we're just really asking the public for their best estimates of what monsoon precipitation will be like on a monthly level at five cities around the Southwest. It sort of circumnavigates the monsoon region here in the U.S.
So, that would be Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Albuquerque and El Paso. And they make their estimates prior to the start of the month for that month at each site, and they score points based on how accurate their forecasts are, in comparison to what actually fell in terms of rain, and also how risky their forecast is. It's a combination of accuracy and riskiness.
DINGMAN: OK. Well, so Zack, tell me, you have a longstanding interest in Southwest climatology. You started a podcast, if I'm not mistaken, back in 2011 about this. What is so fascinating to you about climate in the Southwest, in particular?
GUIDO: Well, first of all, it's just a great place to study the climate and in particular the monsoon. It is a really variable phenomenon. It is unique to this part of the U.S. It brings relief to our heat season, which on a day like today, we really need. It also quells our fire season. And it's just, it's a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. There's so many moving parts to it which make forecasting it extremely difficult, particularly, at times scales longer than a few days.
So, for me, it's just a way for me to look up at the sky and, and continually stoke my curiosity about what's actually happening and why is the weather working in the way it's doing. And, you know, each year I sort of learned something new. So, it's interesting in that sense.
DINGMAN: How predictable are monsoon seasons? Like, are there trends that you can look at and make an educated guess about these things, or do monsoons kind of have a mind of their own?
GUIDO: Well, a little, probably more a mind of their own than they do prediction. At longer time scales, let's say beyond a week, it's hard to, to, to really accurately forecast what the monsoon will, will end up being. Will it be above average, below average, near average? There are some signals that you can use to sort of hedge your bets, but, you know, we're on the northern fringes of the monsoon climate pattern. And consequently, we experience a lot of variability day to day, week to week, season to season, which makes sort of prediction a little bit challenging to do.
So, you know, right now the official forecast is sort of a shrug, like it could be above, it could be below average, and you know, that's really the impetus for this game. It's like you don't actually have to have, you don't need to have studied the weather for, you know, 20 years or a decade or so to have sort of privy knowledge about what it's going to do. Weather enthusiasts or, you know, novices themselves are probably as good of a forecaster as I am.
DINGMAN: Interesting. How would you say our experience of the monsoon here in Phoenix compares to those other cities you were mentioning, Tucson, Flagstaff, Albuquerque and El Paso? Does it manifest itself differently there?
GUIDO: Well, so Phoenix is a little bit later than, so I'm in Tucson, you know, Tucson has like probably twice the amount of rainfall, a little bit more than twice the amount of rainfall sort of that in the lower deserts than Phoenix does. So, it's a more vigorous monsoon. It starts maybe a week earlier, but yeah, Phoenix is drier. Obviously, it's warmer. Flagstaff experiences much more rain just because it's higher elevation. And as you go, generally, as you go north from the border with Mexico, the monsoon sort of signal attenuates a little bit.
And there's some regional differences, like Phoenix tends to get most of its moisture from the Gulf of California, whereas Tucson, you, you can get moisture from, the Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America, and as well as the Gulf of California. And so, there are some regional features, but the main difference is in, in southern, southeast Arizona, in Tucson, we get a little bit more precipitation, more rain days. But nonetheless, in Phoenix, you know, they also experience, you know, 2.5, close to 3 inches of rain. You get those, those days with widespread storms, like really gusty winds. You know, and cloud cover, too, like when there is moisture in the region, like I said before, it sort of helps, reduces that maximum temperature and provides a little bit of relief there. So, yeah, there are, there are spatial differences, but Phoenix experiences a monsoon, just not as vigorously as Tucson does.
