Monsoon Notes Final Found

DENVER - We're smack dab in the middle of Colorado's monsoon season. What does that mean, anyway? 9NEWS Meteorologist Marty Coniglio shared his knowledge of the annual wind pattern known as the monsoon, what it is, and what that means for your summer weather outlook.

And no, all those Rockies rain delays didn't count as our annual monsoon. When is monsoon season in Colorado? Monsoon season can vary, but it's any time from June through September. Typically, it's June, July and August.

Every year is a little different, and this year, we're kind of right in the middle of what is average. What does 'monsoon season' actually mean? What defines monsoon season is having a certain wind circulation pattern that sets up. "When it gets really, really hot in the Midwest and Southeastern United States, there's a clockwise circulation that forms that regularly brings moisture up to Southwest Colorado," 9NEWS Meteorologist Marty Coniglio said. Those winds are what define a monsoon. Does monsoon season mean it will rain every day from June to August? Not necessarily. A monsoon can go in fits and starts.

However, in monsoon season, you will see drenching rains of a longer period of time, since the storms move more slowly due to slower winds aloft. And, on the plus side, the monsoon season storms rarely bring tornadoes and dump less hail than severe springtime storms. "At the end of the day if you're outside getting soaked, or you love that your lawn is getting watered, or you hate that your car is getting dirty, it doesn't matter," Coniglio said. It's all rain, it's just a matter of how it got here and what caused it to form.

But, we had a ton of rain this spring. Doesn't that mean we already had a monsoon season? Nope. The rainy spring we had was not an early monsoon season. That was just a series of storms, and a weather pattern unique to this spring. "A monsoon is a regular, seasonal wind pattern that is reversible. In the summertime if it goes around one way; in the winter time it will go around in the opposite direction," Coniglio said. And don't get the storm or the rain confused for a monsoon; it's not. The monsoon is the wind that brings the moisture here in the first place, causing a storm to form. "A storm is a storm is a storm. All we're talking about is the mechanism that provided the moisture to make the storm in the first place," Coniglio said.