Summer Summary

Since there was no precipitation here at house during June, I'll use two sunrise photos from that month as bookends for this discussion.

Summer 2017 precipitation mostly occurred during the record-setting July, when there was 5.85" of rain here. Thunderstorms occurred on 13 days - some days with multiple periods of thunder. There were 3 days with more than an inch of rainfall. The four days here with over an inch (3 in July and 1 in August) of rain was most ever, with only a few years during past 20 coming in with 2 such days.

August was fairly dismal month with only 1.62" of rain here and only 7 thunderstorm days. Most of month's rainfall occurred during the early morning hours of 13 August when there was 1.16" in the gauge here. In fact, that was the last meaningful rain here at house and things are now VERY dry. The NWS plot of August daily average dewpoint (below) at the airport shows graphically our local dryness, especially after the event of 13 August. 

One severe thunderstorm occurred here, with thunder and gusts to about 60 mph on the afternoon of August 10th. There were 7 days here with 0.25" or more rain, and these days produced 82 percent of the summer's rainfall.

Art Douglas forwarded these two plots that show percent of average precipitation for entirety of meteorological summer. Much of the Southwest (except for New Mexico and west Texas) suffered through a summer of below normal rainfall.

Plot below zooms in on southeast Arizona. The July rains were heaviest on west side of metro area, while east side was dry and below normal for the summer.