Even freakier weather in Phoenix

So yesterday I told you about the monsoon sand storms we get here. And Fiona from Notorious Kitsch commented:

"That sky is so weird, thanks for sharing that, I always imagined Phoenix is just hot hot hot and clear skies all the time!"

Well, nope. I'd have thought that too before I came here - I expected desert = very high dry heat. In fact we joked that the weather reports here would be like on the Fast Show - "scorchio!" and nothing but "scorchio".

I was wrong.

I didn't know before we got here about the monsoon season that Phoenix gets as a pay-off for the 6 months of 100+ temperatures, and I definitely didn't expect what KPHO News were saying in the way only journalists can "some people are calling 'the worst storm on record'".

Yesterday had been a lovely 86°F (30°C) most of the day; it felt Autumnal at last, it felt like home :)

Then it went dark, and the rain started.

Now the amazing thing about Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun as it's known here, is that we can have totally different weather to stuff happening 20 miles down the road. So we had this:

 

Very heavy rain, fair enough. 1.22 inches of rain in less than two hours.

But what we had was NOTHING to some of the rest of Phoenix:

 

 

and even possibly a tornado less than 10-15 miles from us:

 

 

Trees were uprooted, power cable masts toppled flattening houses, huge sections of the freeways seized up due to flooding, houses and streets were flooded too, people had their cars chipped by quarter (2p) size hailstones, others had their windscreens smashed, hundreds of homes were left without electricity - crazy, crazy weather.

There are some amazing photos here on the KPHO.com website.

And today....well, driving around there are plenty of tree branches down still and lots of water still sitting on the roads, but it's sunny....not quite 'scorchio' but it is back sunny again.

Freaky.