Severe Weather

There is a monsoon that occurs in the southwestern U.S. each summer, and it brought heavy rain to the deserts of Arizona this week. This monsoon is less well known than India's Summer Monsoon, but both monsoons have similar causes [1, 2, 3]. In western Mexico and the southern edge of the southwest U.S., most of the year's rain typically falls in just three months: June, July, and August. The region is shown in light blue in the below climate map, which shows where summer rainfall predominates (Figure 1). This seasonal pattern is known as the North American Monsoon. The map was generated using

In mid-February 2021, large areas of the Continental United States experienced extreme cold temperatures as a result of a strong Arctic high pressure system. The cold temperatures were accompanied by several pulses of precipitation over the Southeast US through the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Pacific Northwest. The combination of cold temperatures and precipitation resulted in widespread power outages to millions of people in Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Oregon, among other states.