Can Las Vegas go 8 months without measurable rain?

The drought has been getting worse and worse across the Desert Southwest, which has produced some epic dry stretches.

Phoenix broke their dry streak at 110 days on Wednesday. Meanwhile, farther north and west, Las Vegas has a much more impressive stretch.

Las Vegas has not received measurable rain (0.01 of an inch or more) since April 20. If we get through next Sunday (Dec. 20) without rain, it will be an incredible eight months in the city without rain.

The city has already obliterated the old record for a streak without measurable rain - 150 days set in the spring and early summer of 1959. The epic streak of 2020 has now gone almost three months longer than that.

That streak in 1959 started in February and ended in July, likely the result of monsoon thunderstorms.

We talked ad nauseam here in the blog over the late-summer months on how anemic the monsoon season was. The lack of thunderstorms led to rainfall well below average across Arizona, which could be considered the unofficial home of the Southwest monsoon.

Las Vegas is on the northwestern edge of where these monsoon thunderstorms reach, so they're infrequent but almost always happen to some extent. This year, it just didn't happen. There were some trace amounts of rain, but never anything measurable.

The weak monsoon and slow start to the wet season has left much of the Desert Southwest in an "extreme" drought, the most severe rating given by the Drought Monitor.

So far this wet season, the storm track has been across the Pacific Northwest, which has left much of California and the Southwest dry.

Over the next week or so, the storm track will remain focused in the Northwest, but the corridor for rain and mountain snow will be shifting farther south, certainly helping the dry conditions in Northern California.

One system Friday night into Saturday and another one into Sunday will spread rain from the Northwest coast down through around the Bay Area.

Additional storms throughout next week will continue to be focused across the Northwest. The precipitation with these storms could reach down into Northern California, and it's not out of the question that a little bit of rain reaches SoCal or some of the deserts.

That being said, the overall rain prospects remain pretty slim in the deserts. We'll see if those prospects improve at all as we look ahead to Christmas in my next post early next week.

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