/ Modified sep 10, 2015 7:59 a.m.

Yuma Area Rainfall Was One for the Records

Those records are augmented by Weather Service's corps of volunteer storm watchers.

Rain gauge spotlight

Listen:

By Amanda Solliday, Arizona Science Desk

A Southwestern Arizona resident’s rain gauge collected more water during one storm this week than the area sees on average in a year.

The report of 4.6 inches of precipitation came in to the National Weather Service at Yuma, from the community of Somerton to the east, said meteorologist James Sawtelle.

The downpour was part of the remnants of Pacific Coast Hurricane Linda, which hit Baja California this week. It dropped a record of nearly one inch of rain in the gauge at the Yuma Weather Service office, Sawtelle said.

That much rain in Somerton is considered a 200-year event, which means there is 0.5 percent chance that the same amount of rain would fall in a single day during any given year, weather officials said.

The downpour would have gone unrecorded if it weren't for the volunteer, Sawtelle said. She and others like her complement what the National Weather Service is able to see with radar and satellite imagery.

“Those are the volunteers that give us the ground truth of what’s really going on out there during storms,” he said.

Several hundred individuals are trained as storm spotters by the National Weather Service in central and southwestern Arizona and southeastern California.

During storms, patches of heavy rain might not fall in a large enough area to be captured by official weather stations. So the data collected by storm spotters fills in these gaps and improves future weather predictions.

“The more resolution and the more detail your weather analysis has, the better your weather forecast is going to be,” Sawtelle said.

By posting comments, you agree to our
AZPM encourages comments, but comments that contain profanity, unrelated information, threats, libel, defamatory statements, obscenities, pornography or that violate the law are not allowed. Comments that promote commercial products or services are not allowed. Comments in violation of this policy will be removed. Continued posting of comments that violate this policy will result in the commenter being banned from the site.

By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.
AZPM is a service of the University of Arizona and our broadcast stations are licensed to the Arizona Board of Regents who hold the trademarks for Arizona Public Media and AZPM. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples.
The University of Arizona