National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office

The benefits of the 2012 monsoon have been spotty thus far.  If you happen to be right under a storm, you've done pretty well precipitation-wise.  If not, you're probably hoping August delivers more rain.

Since the only official station is at the Albuquerque Sunport, dedicated members of the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network help fill in the gaps across Albuquerque. Below are two maps showing the distribution of precipitation across Albuquerque for July 2011 and July 2012. 

As a whole, much of the Albuquerque Metro area received more precipitation than last year in July.  However, some may say, it was just distributed differently.  On July 24th, a strong storm with very heavy rainfall dropped significant amounts of rainfall near and just east of the intersection of Paseo del Norte and Interstate 25. Many instances of street flooding were reported.  The NWS Center Weather Service Unit, near Paseo and Louisiana, recorded a whopping 2.02 inches of rain. Without this storm, the map for 2012 would look quite different.  Unfortunately, since the rain fell so fast and furious, it was not as beneficial as it could have been if it fell slower and over several days.