Your updated Catalina Water Year data

Might was well, since no rain will fall here through the end of September (ugh).    Here it is:

The last data point is for 2014-15. These data are an amalgam of the Our Garden site on Pinto and Columbus, from the top of Wilds Road, and the last two years from Sutherland Heights.
The last data point, 18.33 inches, is for 2014-15. These data are an amalgam of the Our Garden site on Pinto and Columbus, from the top of Wilds Road, and the last two years from Sutherland Heights.  Not much going on.

But lets look at a wider set of data to see what’s going on with the whole State of Arizona precip, through 2014, anyway.  The plot below is the ANNUAL statewide average, January through December, the worst possible way to display 12 mos. of precip data.  This is because it slices the cool season (October through May) in half, and whole cool seasons in particular can be impacted La Niñas and El Niños that usually only last one cool season.   So those kinds of effects are muted in the presentation of annual averages in the plot below (from NOAA NCDC).  Sure wish they would issue water year averages (October through September) or even the West Coast, July through June annual average; both of the latter two methods capture El Niños and La Niñas well.

The annual (Jan-Dec) state averaged rainfall for Arizona through 2014.
The annual (Jan-Dec) state averaged rainfall for Arizona through 2014.  You can see that lately we’ve been, as a State, drier than normal following the big wet years of the late 1970s and early 1990s, punctuated by the El Niños of 91-93 (a Pinatubo volcanic effect may be bound up with the early 90s wet spell, too).  Its interesting to note that MOST of the years from the early 40s to late 70s were below average in ANNUAL statewide.  Egad.

 

The End

By Art Rangno

Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.