First Use Of “Monsoon” Terminology For Arizona Summer Rains

I was re-reading Tony Hillerman’s  mystery novel, Skinwalkers, a couple of weeks ago. The book was written in the mid-1980s and published by Harper-Row in 1986. On page 172 I found the following:

     “Howard Morgan, the weatherman on Channel 7, had said there was a 30 percent  

     chance of rain in the Four Corners today. That was the best odds of the summer so far.

     Morgan said the summer monsoon might finally be coming.”

This made me wonder who first used the term “monsoon” to describe the summer thunderstorm season and attendant rainfall in Arizona and New Mexico. After considerable digging, it appears that “monsoon” was first used by Ronald L. Ives (1949) in his article: Climate of the Sonoran Desert Region (Annals of the Association. of American Geographers, 39:3, 143-187). I could be mistaken in this, but Ives’ Section: “The Sonoran Monsoon” does not refer to any previous papers. He primarily uses the character of the annual rainfall at different locations to invoke the use of monsoon terminology and mentions the winds only peripherally, referring to the seasonal reversal of pressure gradients driven by spring heating over the Great Basin.

Ives also may be the originator of the “But it’s a dry heat…” He states the following about the Sonoran Desert: "Because of low relative humidities, sensible temperatures are tolerable, and complaints of summer season discomfort are heard largely from the obese, alcoholic, and neurotic components of the population."

Reid A. Bryson and William P. Lowry (Synoptic Climatology of the Arizona Summer Precipitation Singularity, 1957: Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 36, 329-339) are often referred to in papers about the monsoon; however, they did not use the term in that paper. But, in their 1955 report on research funded by the USAF (Scientific Report No. 1: Synoptic Climatology of the Arizona Summer Monsoon, Dept. of Meteorology, The Univ. of Wisconsin) they stated:

     “To the extent that there has been a rather sharp change of dominant air mass and

     seasonal wind direction in Arizona with general rains following the change, one might

     say that the area had come under the influence of a ‘monsoon’.”

The seasonal wind change they refer is the monthly change in average wind direction at 500 mb from June to July. They then discuss the difficulties in determining whether or not a monsoon had occurred in any given year. They conclude that, from 1930 through 1954, 8 years occurred clearly with a monsoon and 12 years were clearly without a monsoon, while 5 years were indeterminate.

Bryson (photo below from 1981) was a very well-known climatologist at the University of Wisconsin. He spent a year visiting at the University of Arizona in the middle 1950s, which led to his research on the summer rains here.

Obviously, there has been some degree of confusion regarding the “monsoon” continuing through the decades. If anyone is aware of an earlier work that uses "monsoon" for this part of the world, please let me know.