August 30, 2010

Tucson Weather

Here are some links for Tucson weather information: The Tucson area observations are something I am always looking for, and are tucked away in a hard to find place on the NOAA site. If the above link stops working, you may be able to find this data by Using the general info link, clicking on Tucson, then below "Current Conditions" click on "More Local Wx".

My notes

Here is my thumbnail summary. June is really hot, especially late June. There are four hot months, June through September. May can be hot, but it is generally quite tolerable. So you get 8 months of great weather. April and October-November are fantastic.

I have had a weather station at my house since 2017, so I have 7 years of data, recording temperatures every minute. I went through this data, recording the maximum high temperature each day, then I computed average high temperatures for each month: 
01 65.3
02 67.5
03 79.2
04 93.2
05 101.3
06 109.9
07 107.9
08 103.3
09 100.1
10 89.2
11 77.9
12 66.4
Then to get a bit more detail, I split each month into a first half ("A") and a second half ("B"): 
01-A 64.9
01-B 65.5
02-A 66.2
02-B 68.5
03-A 76.5
03-B 81.6
04-A 88.5
04-B 96.8
05-A 100.2
05-B 102.2
06-A 108.9
06-B 111.0
07-A 110.1
07-B 105.1
08-A 103.5
08-B 103.1
09-A 102.8
09-B 98.3
10-A 92.7
10-B 86.1
11-A 81.2
11-B 74.6
12-A 69.0
12-B 64.6
I repeated this, using only data from 2021 to 2024 and got the following. Nothing particularly different from the above. 
01-A 63.2
01-B 64.0
02-A 66.1
02-B 68.5
03-A 72.9
03-B 76.2
04-A 84.6
04-B 92.3
05-A 97.5
05-B 100.8
06-A 106.4
06-B 109.3
07-A 109.6
07-B 105.4
08-A 103.8
08-B 103.1
09-A 101.9
09-B 98.2
10-A 90.1
10-B 84.9
11-A 79.1
11-B 72.6
12-A 68.0
12-B 63.4
I did all of this on 8-11-2024, so this looks at data from 4-7-2017 to 8-10-2024.

Even though we see average highs of 100 all through May, things never really seem consistently nasty until June. Once September rolls around, it is still hot, but you can feel that the transition is in progress. I did all this in mid August of 2024 because I was getting the feeling that things were cooling down. It would also perhaps be interesting to look at overnight lows.

Meteorology

Low pressure areas in the northern hemisphere (sometimes called "cyclones) have winds that rotate counterclockwise around them and are usually cloudy weather.

High pressure areas in the northern hemisphere (sometimes called "anticyclones) have winds that rotate clockwise around them and are usually clear weather.

The base of the stratosphere (top of the troposphere) is about 19,000 feet. ??? It is rare that clouds reach above the top of the troposphere, but sometimes big thunderheads (cumulonimbus) do.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Weather Resources / tom@mmto.org