Monsoon thunderhead over Phoenix
— — the afternoon the sky stacks itself.
Not only on a wall.
“From mid-June through September the desert pulls moisture up out of the Gulf of California and the sky over Phoenix builds anvils. The thunderheads rise faster than buildings, white at the top and bruised below, and the storm walks the city one square mile at a time. South Mountain goes dark while Camelback is still in sun. The first big drops hit dust and pull up the creosote smell the city keeps for the rest of the year. An hour later the wash behind the house is running and the air is cooler than it has been since May.
Monsoon thunderhead over Phoenix, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
Phoenix sits in the Salt River Valley in Maricopa County, Arizona, at about 1,086 feet above sea level, ringed by the South, Camelback, and McDowell Mountains. The North American Monsoon is the regional weather pattern that runs from June 15 through September 30, when shifting winds pull moisture north from the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico into the Sonoran Desert. The National Weather Service forecast office in Phoenix tracks it formally. About half the city's annual rainfall, roughly four inches on average, arrives in those fifteen weeks.
The towers themselves are cumulonimbus, sometimes climbing past 50,000 feet — high enough that the top spreads into the flat anvil shape that gives a mature storm its silhouette. Updrafts of forty or fifty miles an hour build the cloud in less than an hour on an afternoon when the surface dew point clears 55°F. Lightning and microburst downdrafts are the dangerous parts; the wall of dust the downdraft pushes ahead of it, the haboob, can be a mile high and reduce visibility on Interstate 10 to nothing in a matter of minutes.
The official monsoon season in Arizona runs June 15 through September 30 by NWS definition, replacing the old dew-point trigger in 2008. The first storms usually arrive in late June or early July; the most active stretch is mid-July through August. Daytime highs still touch 110°F through it, but the storms drop the temperature twenty degrees in twenty minutes and the air smells of creosote and wet caliche afterward. By early October the pattern breaks and the sky goes back to the blue it holds until next summer.