I’ve always said that you can tell a true long-time New Mexico resident by the fact that they stand outside to watch when it’s raining.
We’re getting some rain this morning, a bit of an anomaly for the first week of June — at least four weeks before the usual summer monsoon rains start. While walking my dog in the lingering sprinkles this morning, a man walking his dog playfully asked me: “What’s this wet stuff coming down from the sky?” It was a sign of New Mexico weather humor rooted in acknowledgement of our dry surroundings.
My wife and children have always suggested I might have been happier in a career as a weather forecaster, where my nerdiness about atmospheric phenomena could have had a full run. With today’s rain, I allowed myself to venture into that topic, wondering about historic rainfall amounts in the Land of Enchantment.
From what I gleaned on several sites, including that of the National Weather Service, 1941 was the mother of all rainfall events in New Mexico since weather records were first captured beginning in 1849.
The total precipitation that year was 26.25 inches, compared to the statewide annual total of about 14 inches. The graph below, from the National Weather Service website, shows the detail of average rain amount by year. As you can see, 1941 was an abnormally wet year.
Rainfall between May and September of 1941 was so abundant that Elephant Butte lake was filled to capacity by the end of the rainy season, according to the NWS. That source also says there were 28 weather related deaths and $3.5 million in property damage (an equivalent of $55 million in today’s economy.) A ranch in San Miguel County recorded 203.6 inches of snow during the winter and Cloudcroft recorded 106.7 inches of snow.
I found this interesting account from a man who as a child lived in the Sacramento Mountains near Cloudcroft that summer.
“Stock tanks with dirt dams were overflowing so we could go swimming if we accepted the cold water and the floating cow chips,” he said “Grass was so tall in some meadow areas that we could not see the white-face calves even when they were standing. Deep mud meant that the ranch pickup could not get us into town for weeks at a time. Two bad-tempered old jersey cows provided milk and cream so we made ice-cream with hail from the tin roof, the only ice available on a ranch with no electricity.”
The nearby mountain community of Whitetail, on the Mescalero Apache Reservation, recorded 62.4 inches of rainfall during that summer.
That year, Las Cruces received almost 20 inches of precipitation, more than double our average 7.5 inches of rain and snow.
Try this link if you want to learn more about the record 1941 season. There’s all sorts of technical discussion about what forces were at work to bring the record rains, some of which I kind of understood, but likely not of interest to most of you.
Weather.gov > Albuquerque, NM > NWS ABQ – 1941 Extreme NM Precipitation
So with rainfall starting in early June, hopefully we’re in for another record year of precipitation in Las Cruces and New Mexico. Hopefully, however, it won’t so much that we have floating cow chips in our streets.
aero-cordero.com 