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http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/environment/severe-storm-blasting-metro-albuquerque
Severe storm blasts metro Albuquerque
Second storm pounding Estancia Valley
Updated: Monday, 23 Aug 2010, 8:51 PM MDT
Published : Monday, 23 Aug 2010, 8:05 PM MDT
ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - A nasty storm producing flooded streets, dangerous lightning and power outages moved through Rio Rancho and into Albuquerque Monday evening with a flash-flood warning in effect until 9:15 p.m.
Firefighters in both cities have responded to reports of homes hit by lightning. No injuries have been reported.
PNM reported thousands of customers were without power including one area off Progress Road in Rio Rancho that left 3,000 customers in the dark. Isolated outages affected another 1,000 customers in Albuquerque, according to PNM.
A flash flood warning covering north-central Bernalillo County and south-central Sandoval County issued by the National Weather Service was in effect until 9:15 p.m.
A weather service advisory on possible arroyo and small-stream flooding was in effect until 9:30 p.m. for adjacent portions of Bernalillo, Torrance, Santa Fe and Sandoval counties. At 7:30 p.m. radar showed a heavy rain developing across a large portion of the Estancia Valley with an estimated 2 inches of rain having fallen on State Road 41 between Moriarty and McIntosh.
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http://www.abqjournal.com/upfront/24223024013upfront08-24-10.htm
'Average' Albuquerque Weather Elusive
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
July was a wet month in Albuquerque, if by "in Albuquerque" you mean this triangular patch of dirt surrounded by runways at the Albuquerque airport that serves as our city's official weather station.
We had 2.19 inches of summer thunderstorm rain at the Sunport, nearly an inch above normal.
So that means it was wet here, right?
Anthony Camacho knows better. He's part of the National Weather Service team that maintains the state's official weather stations. He also has a gauge of his own, in the backyard of his home on the West Side.
"There's a lot of times it's raining here," he said, standing next to the official gauge and pointing toward the mesa across the river where he lives, "and it's not raining over there."
Albuquerque's diverse geography means there's no single place that's characteristic of "the weather" for the city as a whole.
"It's local," Camacho said.
In July, much to my chagrin, "it's local" translated to a parched yard at my house. Just 3.5 miles from the airport weather station, I recorded just 0.48 inches of rain in my backyard gauge, less than a quarter of the "official" total.
I'm a weather nerd, and my trip to the city's official rain gauge was something of a pilgrimage. I've been keeping rainfall data at my house for more than a decade, and I'm always comparing it to the official airport total. But I had never actually visited the official weather station.
So on a bright summer morning a couple of weeks back, Journal photographer Marla Brose and I joined Camacho and a group of his colleagues, piling into a pair of National Weather Service trucks. Through a guarded gate, with Camacho in regular contact with the airport tower to make sure we didn't get run over by a jetliner, we drove down the taxiways and onto the dirt next to a line of instruments that collect Albuquerque's weather data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There are thermometers, a device that looks up to measure cloud cover and an ultrasonic wind sensor. But it was the rain gauge that interested me, the AWPAG — All Weather Precipitation Accumulation Gauge.
It looks like a big shiny bucket, with a funnel on the top and a very precise scale inside to measure the water that falls. Fiber optics connect it to a nearby rack of communication gear and, via a network of weather websites, to the world.
If you look up "the weather in Albuquerque," this is most often what you get.
Since 1939, we've had an official weather station at the airport, which is often where government-run weather stations are located. Pilots need good weather info, and stations like this are jointly funded by the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Seventy-plus years is a good record in weather station terms, enough time to determine long-term averages.
"It's a good point of reference," said Charlie Liles, former head meteorologist at the weather service's Albuquerque office.
But as July's rainfall totals show, getting your data from a single point has its shortcomings.
Albuquerque's meteorological diversity seemed like a problem to Liles when he moved here two decades ago to take the state's top weather job. A single number describing the metro area's weather just didn't seem like enough. One of the first things he did was add a weather station at his home in the foothills, which he still dutifully monitors every day, even in retirement. (He reported 3.43 inches in July.)
With long-term weather stations run by volunteers in Corrales (0.94 inches in July) and the South Valley (1.5 inches in July) along with Liles' backyard observations, we now have good data on the average weather at four sites around the metro area.
But to a weather nerd, more data is always better. For the past 11 years, I've been a volunteer observer in the weather service's Citynet program, a group of 65 people with rain gauges in their yards who submit their precipitation numbers once a month.
More recently, a nationwide program called CoCoRaHS — the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network — has taken off in a big way.
There are currently 111 CoCoRaHS volunteers signed up in Bernalillo County, according to Jerry Anderson, the local volunteer coordinator.
Anderson, who lives in the valley, got interested because he is a beekeeper, and the amount of rain that has fallen is a key in knowing when and how much honey to harvest.
You can look up daily maps of rainfall reports on the CoCoRaHS web site (www.cocorahs.org). And best of all, for the price of a rain gauge, you can join the network and know with certainty how much fell in your yard.
And you can help public understanding of the weather in a wacky place like Albuquerque, where, as Camacho explained, it's all local.
(To sign up for CoCoRaHS, go to the home page —
www.cocorahs.org — and click on the "Join the CoCoRaHS Network" link near the bottom of the page. For a map with more local weather stations, including current temperatures and wind conditions:
www.abqjournal.com/weathermap.)
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column.
Read more: ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: 'Average' Albuquerque Weather Elusive
http://www.abqjournal.com/upfront/24223024013upfront08-24-10.htm#ixzz0xXvM0ZyT
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