Despite Montezuma Countys short reprieve from recent rains that dropped daytime high temperatures below 90 degrees for a few days this past week, those temperatures are expected to climb again this weekend.
Jim Andrus, meteorologist cooperative weather observer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said monsoon storms resulted in a small amount of rain July 4-6, but he expects this monsoon pattern to move out by early today.
During the month of June this year, the temperature exceeded 90 on 20 days.
Andrus said even with the .08 inch of rain and the moisture in the air on Wednesday, July 4, the temperature still reached 91 degrees, with the high on Thursday in the low 80s, the high 80s on Friday and into the 90s this weekend.
The meteorologist said that although warm weather is expected in June, temperatures were significantly hotter than the long-term average.
It was definitely hotter than normal. It was 10 to 15 degrees hotter than average, he said.
He also said the dew points for the month of June never reached more than 10 percent which prevented any type of monsoonal activity because a dew point of 20 to 30 percent signals the beginning of the season.
He explained that a monsoon is basically a weather pattern where a high pressure front occurs across the eastern part of the United States and flows clockwise and north from Mexico to the Four Corners region. Andrus said the monsoon rain last week came about two weeks sooner than what is normally expected in Montezuma County, as the middle of July is the usual time for this type of weather, but the respite was short-lived.
By the weekend it will dry out and return to the 90s, Andrus said. We are not done with the 90-degree weather.
He said the Four Corners will receive a storm and then the rain will flow to another region or state before returning, and added this pattern is repeated over and over, so there will be many more days with dry, hot weather even during the monsoon season.
In a typical year in Montezuma County, .43 inches of rain is the average for the month of June, and Andrus said that increases to 1.23 inches in July because of the monsoon pattern. For the month of June 2012, Cortez received just .07 of an inch of rain.
Past monsoons have resulted in more than 1.3 inches of rain in both August and September, he said.
He also said while the county will receive some rain from this weather pattern during the next three months, he does not expect any extended downpours that floods streets and neighborhoods, saying it has been several years since a gully flush occurred.
As an example, he pointed to the .08 inch of rain that fell on July 4.
We will get minimal amounts of rain during the season, but there will be episodes (of rainfall) for several days, he said. A monsoon is like a river of moisture. The moisture flows back and forth.
Reach Michael Maresh at [email protected]
