How High the Sky

I've been kind of a weather nut all my life, ever since I heard my mother say "red sky in the morning, sailor take warning, red sky at night, sailor's delight". I love to watch the sky and guess what the weather is going to be like. I grew up hearing about how the farmers could foretell the weather and all the country verses that helped. And about the woolly bear caterpillar for the winter and whether the smoke from a campfire rose or settled. So I like to watch the sky.

And out here you can really watch the sky. When we first got out here in May, the sky was always clear and blue, day after day. Pretty boring. But with the start of July we started to see clouds most days. Supposedly, the monsoon season starts the  first part of July and it then rains often until the end of September. Well, that's not quite the case as it didn't start to rain until August and then it's been pretty spotty. But it has rained. So far this month our gage has measured about 5" total. You can see in the photo that the tank or pond in the lower right has a good amount of water in it now. I watched a Great Blue Heron fly in for some hunting yesterday. There are no fish that I know of but there are hundreds of frogs.

The clouds are the same types I grew up watching but the weather signs I grew up learning just don't seem to apply around here. I can watch a cumulus cloud like the one in the picture grow and grow but unlike home where it would sweep across the landscape, here as often as not it just sits there and dumps water on one spot. The other day we went into town and from the hill we could see a terrific rainstorm about two miles wide just dumping on the town and blue sky all around it.

One of the things I know I'll miss is the ability to see for a long distance. I can watch storms build and rain on places that I know are 50 or more miles away. At night I can watch lightning from storms over 100 miles away. At home, I'm lucky to see clouds that are five miles away. I see a rain cloud let loose and I go to the radar map to see just where it is and I'm often surprised at how far way the storm really is.

Because of the way the storms develop out here, actually getting rain is a real hit or miss proposition. Many times I've seen it pouring on three sides of us and not a drop hits here. Or we just get brushed by an outer edge and only get a trace. But if it does rain on top of us it comes down heavy, just like in Carolina. And it runs off and creates flash floods and cuts channels in the dirt roads making them even worse than they usually are.

When we lived up North we were used to heavy snow. When we moved to North Carolina we laughed at the consternation that 3 or 4 inches of snow caused. Now that we're in North Carolina we're used to the heavy rainfall. So it was interesting to see the reaction when Phoenix got .8" of rain yesterday. It was on all the news channels. People tried to drive across flooded roads and got stuck. Flash floods closed roads with silt. Dramatic pictures of rain clouds were featured on the news.
All for less than one inch of rain. What a difference. Incidentally, Arizona has a "Stupid Driver Law" whereby if a motorist ignores a road closed sign and tries to drive across a flooded street and then gets stuck, he can be assessed the cost of the rescue up to $2000.

I'm looking forward to getting back home to watch the sun in the morning and smoke from my campfire.