Spring Green
Saguaro National Park, Arizona
2015
It was so green and lush when we were in Tucson, I thought I ought to post at least one color photo of the desert. It’s probably greener than a desert ought to be. The rain and fog that started this day certainly had something to do with that look.
I’m a sucker for fog photos so I love this one. And I expect it’s rather unusual to have ocatillo and saguaro cactus as the foreground elements in a fog pictures. Don’t think I’ve seen that before. When I lived in the Las Vegas desert, fog would be as rare as snow!
Kathy, I lived in Tucson for four years back in the day and I remember fog a few times, and snow only once. It’s wetter in Tucson than in Vegas so I imagine both fog and snow are a bit more common there. I think I read once that the Sonoran Desert around Tucson got about the maximum moisture per year to still be considered a desert, but I just looked up the definition of desert and it shows 10 inches or less per year while Tucson gets just over 11 inches so by that simple definition, it isn’t really a desert. However, the more detailed definitions also take into account general aridity. In deserts the rate of potential evapotranspiration exceeds the average annual rainfall by factors ranging from 2:1 to 33:1 or more. In other words, a desert is arid. I imagine the Tucson area certainly qualifies on that account. (511: more information than you wanted to know!)
Thanks for all the extra info, Larry! I did actually enjoy it. Did not think that Vegas (further north) would be drier/hotter than Tucson (further south). I seem to remember it always being hotter in Tucson than Vegas. In the 9 years I lived in Vegas, it snowed once. Since I moved away 18 years ago, it’s snowed again only once! 😉 And I’m talking a snowfall that stuck on the ground long enough for people to see it. 😉
Kathy, it’s interesting how perceptions differ–my impression was always that Vegas was hotter than Tucson. It appears your perception is correct, at least the one web site I just looked at shows Tucson with a higher maximum temperature and a higher average temperature. But the difference was only 1 degree C in both cases.