Monsoons make deserts bloom in the US Southwest, but climate change is making these summer rainfalls

[AZLD4Candidate]

Monsoons make deserts bloom in the US Southwest, but climate change is making these summer rainfalls more extreme and erratic

If you’ve never lived in or visited the U.S. Southwest, you might picture it as a desert that is always hot and dry. But this region experiences a monsoon in the late summer that produces thunderstorms and severe weather, much like India’s famous summer deluges.

And this year, it generated a lot of rain.

July 2021 was the wettest month since record keeping started at the Tucson, Arizona, airport in 1895, with 8.06 inches (205 millimeters) of rainfall – equivalent to 70% of what the city receives in an average year. This year’s monsoon is the third-wettest ever in Tucson, with 12.80 inches (325 millimeters) of rain.

It was completely the opposite in 2020: Tucson had a dry “non-soon”, with less than 2 inches of rain. These conditions and record high temperatures fueled Arizona’s largest wildfire season in a decade, including the Bighorn Fire, which decimated over 60% of the forest in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.

With our drought and our now erratic, feast-or-famine monsoons, our water supply is on life support.

It is time we in Arizona start really looking for solutions. I have one. It will take reworking the 1922 Colorado Protocol completely.

My opponent only wants tax cuts for Big Ag, but the rest of us knows Big Ag dies without water. It's the Big Business "Locust" Mentality; pillage until there is nothing left, then pillage another area.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/monsoons-make-deserts-bloom-in-the-us-southwest-but-climate-change-is-making-these-summer-rainfalls-more-extreme-and-erratic/ar-AAP2mRR?ocid=winp1taskbar

[in2herbs]

1. I live in northern Maricopa County and, according to weather reports I've seen yesterday's monsoon

finale dropped 0.9 inches of rain in my area. It's not the rain we need to overcome the drought as much as the snow pack and we're just not getting the snow pack. I think 2022 will be an eye opener from a lot of people in AZ if/when the water restrictions are put into place. Even though I don't know all the details of the 1922 Colorado Protocol, isn't there a large portion of the water rights that are owned by the Native Americans? If so I hope they stick to their guns and demand their rights, but won't it make it almost impossible to rework the Protocol? In the town where I live everyone else in AZ gets water before we will. I understand that Phx won't be as affected with rationing because they have larger underground storage tanks and a more modern purification system.

I hope tax cuts won't go to Nestle. That company is very dangerous. to the world!

Hope you continue to make positive progress to get your wife home.

[AZLD4Candidate]

2. Native Americans sold off their water rights years ago. If the water isn't on their land, it isn't

theirs. This was done under legal and political duress, but that's what we've done. I live on the Tohono o'Odham Nation in Sells.

All the water is either private wells or water towers.

The Colorado Protocol divided the Colorado River water among six states. You can read more about it on my campaign website.

[Budi]

3. A friend in Flagstaff is only now laying the floor of the house that'll replace the one that...

...that washed down the flooded creek this summer.
Water hadn't even receeded when the second flood hit.

[Dale in Laurel MD]

4. I knew Tucson was forward-looking

but didn't realize they had an airport in 1895.

(Seriously, Tucson is one of my favoriteplaces in the world.)

[AZLD4Candidate]

5. AZ LD4 is SW Tucson. I'm in Pima County

I didn't realize that too. But if you go into it, it does have a 1960s feel to it.