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 Yes, the monsoon season is really here.
We've got a newsroom joke that the monsoon season is not official underway until Fleck (that's me) says it is. What the really means is that the monsoon season is not really underway until one of the crew at the National Weather Service tells Fleck that it is, and then Fleck tells everyone else. Journalists are messengers.
The task has been made more difficult this year by the Weather Service's decision to avoid the annoying "has it started or not?" calls from people like Fleck by simply declaring June 15 the "start of the monsoon season". After all, they reason, we don't wait until the first hurricane makes landfall to declare the start of the hurricane season. That left me with a dilemma. It's been weirdly rainy since late May in Albuquerque, but not really "monsoonal." So, yeah, sure, the official start of the monsoon season is nine days past. Whatever. Is this - the weather we're experiencing today - a monsoony sort of rain thing? As of yesterday, the answer is an emphatic "yes", the Weather Service's Ed Polasko told me. Sort of. "The monsoon season may have arrived," Polasko told me today. Our monsoon is part of one of the world's more modest examples of the climatic pattern. Those familiar with the Indian version complain that the word should not apply here, given how relatively modest our summer rains our. But the underlying climatic pattern - a warming upland (here, the Colorado Plateau) pulls in moist air from the ocean - holds here. Local thermal lift builds it into great rainstorms. That is different than the large-scale storm patterns at other times of year, in which broad weather fronts, generally from the west, bring storms with them. In fact, according to Polasko, the loss of the high-altitude westerlies is one of the key indicators that we're really in a monsoon pattern.
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