Monsoons
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Donovan: Where two Deserts Meet is an official podcast of Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Tree National Park acknowledges the Serrano, Chauilla, Mojave, and Chemehuevi people as the original stewards of the land in which the park now sits. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with the indigenous people in this place, and we pay our respects to the people past, present, and emerging who have been here since time in Memorial. Ian: Hi, I'm Ian. Donovan: And I'm Donovan. Ian: And we are both park rangers here at Joshua Tree National Park, Where Two Deserts Meet is an official podcast of Joshua Tree National Park, where we explore topics that often require a bit more detail and the help of an expert in the field to gain perspective. Donovan: Hey, Ian, did I ever tell you about that one time I almost got caught in a flash flood? Ian: Uh, no. What happened? Donovan: During the summer of 2022, I was stationed down at Cottonwood Visitor Center for the day, and the drive down was pretty peaceful and covered with blue skies. As the day went on, I remember often looking outside the west facing window and I started to see denser and denser clouds form. I remember actually being pretty excited by this image because usually that means that the sun will be blocked by them. Providing a brief moment of shade, which can feel amazing, especially when it's usually over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside. That feeling of relief was short-lived. However, as those white fluffy clouds soon turned to a dark gray cover, blocking all sunlight completely, what once was a pleasant Sunday afternoon? Looked as though it was now. 8:00 PM at night. It was clear to me that the rain was coming and I needed to get back as soon as possible. Luckily, we had just closed up the visitor center and we were getting ready to drive back up to headquarters. As we started to drive, we heard sounds of thunder in the distance. We could see some signs of rain about five to six miles east of smoke tree wash just off of Pinto Basin Road there. But luckily, no signs on the road. We were actively driving as we turned the corner. Suddenly we started to see a small stream form across the porcupine wash area. The water was only about one to two inches deep, so I decided to push forward. I then pulled over and waited just to keep an eye on the situation, but not even after one minute of driving through what was a small creek, it had now become a river at least. Four to five inches deep. I got out of the car and put on a safety vest to stop incoming cars from passing through the flood. After about five minutes, the water was almost a foot deep and I could see large rocks in boulders being pushed onto the road by the force of the water. I radioed the rest of the park to let them know that there was a flash flood occurring. The amazing part about all of this that I'm still surprised today about flash flooding is for myself and those cars that had to wait that day, we only waited about 20 minutes for that water to come and go. As fast as it came, it went and everybody was able to proceed on with a regular day, you know? Ian: I feel like that's actually sort of a common story. Most rangers at Joshua Tree National Park have had their own flash flood story after living here for a while. Your story reminds me of how hard it is sometimes as a ranger giving informed advice to visitors, considering sometimes we get those visitors who really want a definitive answer on if rain will impact their trip or not. Sometimes the only thing we can advise them is to be prepared for anything, especially during the monsoon season when it's hot and summery and rain is the last thing most visitors expect. But the monsoon season here has played a significant role in shaping the desert. Donovan: I feel like the weather here in the desert often confuses a lot of people. The extremes of day and night temperatures elevated precipitation in the summer. I think it's about time we consult a meteorologist on this one. Ian: Wait. What do meteors have to do with weather? Dononvan: Oh, okay. Ian, you know what meteorology is. Ian: I know. I just couldn't let us get away with doing a meteorology episode without making the joke once. But really though meteorology is no joke despite its misleading name. Meteorology goes beyond just the study of weather. The atmosphere and its phenomena. Donovan: And of course when talking about meteorology and Joshua Tree National Park, it would be impossible to do so without mentioning our friends at the National Weather Service in Phoenix, Arizona, who we rely on daily to have the most up-to-date weather inside the park. Luckily, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service agreed to talk with us on all things weather and especially the complexities of the monsoon season here in Joshua Tree National Park. Jessica: My name is Jessica Leffel and I'm a meteorologist at Nashville Weather Service Phoenix. Uh, we have over 120 different weather forecast offices across the country, and they stretch anywhere from Puerto Rico to Guam, but here in Phoenix, we actually cover South Central Arizona, stretching all the way into Southeast California. And we do a variety of different things here. So we'll do anything from forecasting to aviation weather to DSS, which is decision support services, helping our political partners out if they have events going on, as well as looking out and doing outreach events too, and doing the best that we can to get out into the public and educate people on weather preparedness. Donovan: On top of all that, Jessica is a part of the team that plays the important role of providing the weather forecast for Joshua Tree National Park. We utilize their weather resources in all our daily operations, visitor education and resource management. In the desert where weather conditions are often extreme, receiving alerts of potential hazardous conditions is often critical to visitor and park staff safety. But before we dive into that, we ask Jessica, what does an average workday look like for a meteorologist? Jessica: Depending on the day, you know, usually right now we're starting to get into the monsoon, so, our shifts will be a little bit more occupied. But outside of that, we do have routine shift duties that we have to get accomplished. So that's putting out our forecast. So that's something that anyone could go on our website to see what the high and low temperature's going to be, what the winds are going to be like, or all of those different. Variables that they're interested to know about the weather. We also put out a forecast discussion as well, and that kind of covers goes over our understanding of what's happening in the upper air and giving a better idea of synoptically what's happening so we can explain our reasoning and what different things we're seeing to cause the current weather that we're having. On top of that as well, we'll also put out an aviation forecast and that will include things called T A Fs. TAFs for short, and it's a terminal arid drum forecast. So this is something that we provide for the different airports within our region. So we have, currently about five airports that we create these forecasts for. And they'll go over any conditions or any changes so that the airports are ready to go and know if they need to change their runway configuration, if there's gonna be a wind shift, for example. Um, just to increase the safeness of the taking off and landing of airplanes. Beyond that as well, we do answer lots of public phone calls anytime anyone has any question about what's going on with the weather, as well as answering phone calls from our media partners to produce interviews to give, the public a better idea of what's happening and what different things that they can be prepared about for upcoming weather. And then beyond that, whenever we get into the actual activeness of the monsoon and the height of everything, we'll start putting out watches and warnings and advisories and doing the best that we can to warm the public before severe weather is approaching Ian: Meteorologist do a lot more work behind the scenes to keep us safe than we can even imagine. However, we often take weather forecasts for granted as they are often much more work to produce than it takes to access them. It's easy for us as the general public to open up an app on our phone and within seconds get an idea of what the next seven days of weather will look like almost anywhere in the world for a meteorologist. It's much more than that. So what exactly is happening behind the scenes of those forecasts? Jessica: With weather prediction, we do a lot to look at the current state of the atmosphere, and then we also look at a bunch of different models and different things to see how the atmosphere is going to evolve and then change our forecast. So we'll look at lots of current observations. So we'll check out what's happening with surface observations, what's happening with satellite imagery, what's happening with radar data radio, saw data, upper air data, and much more to get a big picture idea of what's currently happening. And then we use our pattern recognition and the skills that we learned in school from our foundation of understanding the upper air and the atmosphere and the different changes that it goes through, depending on the atmospheric pattern, we're able to see how this situation currently is going to evolve, and then that helps us predict w
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