The atmospheric ingredients are coming together for an above-average Southwest monsoon season. It just might not help Utah anytime soon.
Once it became clear Utah’s snowpack would hit record lows, weather scientists began to look toward the summer rainy season with fingers crossed, said Assistant State Climatologist Jon Meyer. The signs are still looking good.
“We still have a little bit of runway left to see how things evolve,” Meyer said, “but right now we are optimistic that when we look back in the end of September on the summer rainfall patterns, that the region as a whole will have experienced an above-average amount of monsoonal moisture.”
A strong monsoon season would be a big relief after Utah’s historically dry, warm winter and spring. The entire state has been in drought since late March, and Gov. Spencer Cox declared a statewide drought emergency in May.
But the latest seasonal outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has drought conditions improving across most of southern and eastern Utah between now and the end of August.
“While it doesn't provide a whole lot of substantial water volumes, the general weather pattern that the summer experiences can really either be the throttle or the brakes for drought condition changes,” Meyer said, “during a really hot time of the year, when water use is way, way up.”
It may sound counterintuitive, but one of the ingredients fueling this positive outlook is the West’s dry soils, which help the landscape warm quickly and kickstart monsoon movement. Also contributing are warm sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which will release extra energy into the atmosphere.
The strong El Niño weather pattern that’s expected to emerge soon can also impact the Southwest’s summer precipitation by influencing hurricanes. The 2026 hurricane season in the eastern Pacific is forecast to be stronger and more active than normal, according to NOAA’s latest outlook. If any of those systems make their way inland to Utah, Meyer said, it can drop a summer’s worth of rain in just one or two storms.
Still, the forecast for the first part of the monsoon season looks best for regions to Utah’s south and east. There are concerns, Meyer said, that the state may not see any precipitation for the rest of June. Monsoon season typically starts in late June in southern Utah and creeps into the rest of the state in early July.
Even if monsoon rains arrive in Utah later this summer, there are limitations to how much they would help.
Like the rest of Utah, Washington County historically depends on water that trickles down from melting snowpack rather than rainfall. Downpours don’t usually boost city water supplies because the flow rushes downstream all at once and carries a lot of debris, said Doug Bennett, the Washington County Water Conservancy District’s conservation manager.
“We don't expect that those reservoirs are going to go up, even if we have storm events,” he said. “But what we can do is slow their depletion by responding to those rain events and turning off our irrigation systems.”
That means Utahns could play a big role in determining the positive impact of monsoon rains by simply watering their lawns less after a storm.
“Rainfall events can save us up to 40 million gallons per day during the summer months,” Bennett said. “So, it's not so much that having more water flowing into the Virgin River from rainfall allows us to fill our reservoirs as it is trying to get people to keep water in those reservoirs.”
Installing a smart irrigation control system can make it easier to pull back on outdoor watering. Residents can also adapt their landscaping to the region’s hot, dry reality by ditching grass for drought-tolerant plants. The district offers incentives for customers to take both actions, and it recently increased its lawn replacement rebate to $3 per square foot in response to drought.
If the monsoon season is active in the Four Corners region as expected, Meyer said, the presence of clouds, high humidity and rainfall could still relieve some of the short-term drought the Southwest landscape has endured in recent months. But it’s important to take the positive outlook with a grain of salt.
The monsoon is one of the most variable weather patterns in the West, he said, which makes it notoriously unpredictable. And a couple of storms wouldn’t change Utah’s long-term situation.
“Our reservoirs are still in a pretty rough place. Our soil moisture is deeper than the root zones,” Meyer said. “Everything right now is still very much affected by the longer-term drought conditions that have been in place for maybe five or 10 years.”
