Heat Column Microclimate

After a few weeks of drought right in the middle of monsoon season, we finally got some rain. This year reminds of one shortly after I moved into my house. The neighborhood was still under construction and all the vegetation was young and the streets got hot for the lack of shade. Due to wildfire risk, there are few lawns in the neighborhood. Houses are surrounded by gravel xeriscape rather than grass.

Monsoon season produced little rain that year in the neighborhood and I got the crazy idea that all the exposed hard surfaces and lack of shade was creating a heat column that caused rain the miss the neighborhood. You could often see a gap on the local radar right where I live.

Note that I have no qualifications whatsoever to theorize about meteorology.

Now the neighborhood is completely filled in and the bushes and saplings have grown into trees. We had good rainfall for a few years. But there is again a lot of construction nearby, with attendant deforestation, bulldozing, paving, and pouring of concrete onto what was once forest and prairie, and again it seems storms are "splitting" right over the area. I don't know if that's in my imagination or if it's a possibility.