© Roberto E. Rosales / JournalRain in Albuquerque early Tuesday morning.
Rain in Albuquerque from 6 a.m. Monday to 6 a.m. Tuesday set a 24-hour record for the city, breaking a standard that dates to 1893 and positioning Albuquerque nicely for a wetter-than-average monsoon season.
"Pretty much all the climate indicators are calling for an average to above-average monsoon season," Brian Guyer, meteorologist with the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service, said Tuesday.
In the first week, we've already had 60 percent of an average monsoon season, he said, so "I'm guessing we are headed to above average."
Albuquerque's official 24-hour rainfall total on Monday and Tuesday was 2.24 inches, besting the city's previous 24-hour total of 2.08 inches, set on Sept. 28, 1893.That brings Albuquerque's total rain for the first week of this month to well over 2 inches. The average July rain total for Albuquerque is 1.5 inches, and the city's record total for the month is 4.9 inches, set in 1930. As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, Albuquerque's total rainfall for the year was 6.60 inches, 3.14 inches above normal.Monsoon season runs from July 1 through September 30. Guyer said that Albuquerque's average rainfall during the period is 3.79 inches and that the city got more than 8 inches of rain in its wettest monsoon seasons, in 1988 and 2006. By contrast, Guyer said, Albuquerque's driest monsoon season was in 1953, when there was only 1.1 inches of rain.
"Typically, the wettest weeks of the monsoon season are the last week of July and the first week in August," Guyer said.
