Arizona Summers Getting Cooler

The number of 100 degree days in Arizona is down about 50% since the 1950’s

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I attended Arizona State University during the 1970’s, and in the summer of 1974 we had the worst heatwave in Arizona history.

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About Tony Heller

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10 Responses to Arizona Summers Getting Cooler

  1. emsnews says:

    OK: I grew up in Tucson, AZ, since the early 1950’s.

    It was much hotter back then! When I was very young, it was quite hot and dry and the sixties was all about rain. Lots and lots of rain. In the seventies, the nights became much colder and it even snowed more than once.

    I lived with no central heating when in college so I noticed this cold much more than people living in protected housing. I bought some fur coats from Value Village and cut them up and made blankets out of them.

    These were so popular with others living in primitive housing around the U of A, I sold several of these to others.

    It was COLD at night in winter, really cold.

    In the fifties, it was hot. And we had this huge cricket invasion one year. My mom was going nuts from the crickets so she put us in the car and drove to Pasadena to sleep there. I killed crickets with a hammer and my older brother would burn the carcasses.

    There was a grasshopper invasion during the fifties, too.

  2. emsnews says:

    My memory is correct: http://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/impacts/hydrology/state_fd/azwater1.html

    Drought 1942- 64 Statewide >100 Second most severe in 350 years, on the basis of tree-growth records.

    Yes! It was so dry, my little brother, David, cried when it rained and we screamed and ran out of the church and danced in the rain until a lightning bolt scared us back inside.

    By 1965, it was raining so hard so much, we had floods. Example: my school bus driver asked me to get out of the bus out in the foothills of Catalina Mountain and check to see if a bridge still was there because the water was running over the bridge.

    We had to have boards set up in the bus unloading dock because the mud was so deep! I was amazed at all the water, being used to no rain, ever.

    • During the winter of 1980, every bridge in Phoenix washed out – except for the oldest one at Mill Avenue.

      • Ernest Bush says:

        In the early 1990’s the US95 bridge over the Gila River outside of Yuma washed out and flooding of the Gila River cut farmers off from towns like Wellton. To get to Yuma they had to travel north through the interior of Yuma Proving Ground, then cross over to the California side of the Colorado River to travel down to the 4th Ave. bridge crossing. I drove home through California roads for six months. There were many accidents because of the poor road conditions through California.

  3. emsnews says:

    Yes, Arizona is ‘all rain/no rain’ all the time!

    My grandaddy lived there in the 1890’s. He told me, ‘When I was young, the grass grew to the bellies of the horses…and then it stopped raining.’ The Indians talked about previous droughts including stories and legends of the terrible drought during the Little Ice Age which nearly eliminated the local tribes like the Pima.

  4. Ernest Bush says:

    Summers have been obviously cooler in Yuma since 1990, even. Today grass usually grows on the desert north of town during the August-September period. It’s dense enough to turn the foothills (we call them mountains) green. This trend started sometime after 2000 and hasn’t changed.

    The desert southwest has had two periods of really, really, bad droughts during the last 1,000 years, according to proxy data. One lasted 220 years and the other lasted over 100. Imagine what that would do to the huge population living from Los Angeles to San Diego inland.

  5. emsnews says:

    The problem is the huge population in water uncertainty lands. People moved to LA because it doesn’t rain very much there. This is why Hollywood happened: the sun shone most of the time!

    It is ridiculous, parking a huge population where droughts are common! But what is the migration going on? To the hot south where it is very dry! All the hot states are seeing lots of population growth and none of the cold are seeing this.

  6. philjourdan says:

    LeftinFlagstaff is going to hate that.

  7. Phoenix last saw temps around 120° in the 1990s, thus we have global cooling. And in 2009, the local paper headline was “June hasn’t been this nice since … 1913” http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/06/19/20090619junelovely0619.html

  8. Right… so its cooling in AZ yet all we hear in the Media is harping about how hot it is.. already today they are saying how the MidWest is hot…

    Whatever, total garbage, data manipulation!!

    Time to give $$ to Steven here … keep up the awesome work.

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