Earliest mention of monsoon in Arizona
PHOENIX (AZFamily) --- What’s in a name?
When I first started working at Channel 3 in 1984, we would get calls all summer long from people complaining that we were calling the summer thunderstorm season, “the monsoon.”
In retrospect, it’s very interesting that we were still getting that pushback, considering the term “monsoon” was first applied to the southwest summer pattern in 1949. It was in an article by Ronald Ives, who called it the “Sonoran Monsoon.” I kind of like that. I have a copy of the publication, and here it is in print.
Today, we know that Arizona is part of the North American monsoon, one of eight monsoons identified around the globe. I suppose Ronald Ives is the father of the Arizona Monsoon.
Anything new takes some time to digest, so it’s no surprise that newspaper articles of the 1950s reflect the confusion. Check out this article from the Arizona Republic in July 1955. It’s July, so according to the state climatologist at the time, Paul Kanghieser, that’s the start of the monsoon. And the headline dubs the month “Hapless.” How I miss newspapers.
Then there’s this one, a couple of years later, when Kanghieser, who would later co-develop what is now called the “legacy” method of tracking when the monsoon arrives (three days, 55 dew points), further explains why the Arizona monsoon is a “real” monsoon.
My favorite article found from the same time period, however, is a letter to the editor at the Tucson Star complaining about the use of the word monsoon. Then the editor explains, tongue-in-cheek, why he thinks it’s called that.
“It’s our belief that Tucson’s use of the term ‘monsoon’ dates back to the cynical observation of a printer, here from a much damper clime. As he watched a very small summer shower come and go, he commented sardonically, ‘Well, now we’ve had our monsoon season, get set for a long dry spell.’”
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