CIBOLA COUNTY, N.M. - By custom, we collect statistics for the monsoon season in New Mexico from June through September. Typically the vast majority of lightning and a substantial amount of precipitation occur during this period. Using publicly available data from NOAA, we can measure how active the monsoon season was for the state of New Mexico and just how active it was for Cibola County.
For this article, we are using gridded counts of daily lightning strikes and daily maps of the total precipitation for the day. To understand how usual or unusual this year was, we calculate the average using 20 years of data from the first part of this century.
On average, the state of New Mexico received 9.15 inches of rain during the 2026 monsoon season. This is the third wettest monsoon for the state since 2002. In Cibola County, we received an average rainfall of 13.05 inches, which is our second wettest monsoon since 2002. From August, we had a nearly average monsoon season. The torrential rains over the last two weeks of September pushed us into well above average territory and caused significant flooding across the southern part of the state.
The 2026 monsoon season did not have as much lightning as one would expect from the well above average precipitation totals for the state. During this monsoon season, there were roughly 1,400,000 lightning strikes in NM, which is 80% of average. For Cibola County, there were 22,959 strikes, which is 105% of average. It is important to note that while the last two weeks of September were very rainy, there wasn’t a lot of lightning associated with those storms.
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