Monsoon Is Here; and Why It's Fun to Watch

Last evening around 6:30 I got several big drops with just a little thunder. A second round of storms mostly fizzled before 9 pm as it came across the mountains out of the northeast. Finally after 10 pm a light rain barely wetted the ground at my place. The 10:30 radar depicted that the second round had developed new convective life after it reached I-10; the brief stratiform rain at my place appeared to have built back from that slight rejuvenation. The same radar showed a few short lines persisting about 50 miles upstream. I went to bed. The third round came through about 1:30 am, preceded and followed by over an hour of loud thunder reverberating off the mountains and everything else. (Fortunately anguish about confident all over for tonight forecasts is well behind me, and it will be easy to fit in a nap today. The local media had mixed messages on their 10 pm newscasts, apparently depending on whether they had noticed the 9:55 pm NWS discussion.) It must have rained off and on for much of the rest of the night. I got 0.65 of an inch.
Ealier, between rounds one and two, at about 7:30 a radio alert announced that a severe warning had been issued for an area centered on the intersection of Alvernon-Drexel, 12 miles south-southeast of me. I went out to take a look, and spent several minutes jealously admiring a rain shaft intense enough to produce a bright rainbow even in the setting sun.

By the time I went inside to get my iphone, the rainbow had faded to what can be seen above. The Alvernon-Drexel intersection is to the right of the rainbow and about twice as far out. There was occasional-to-frequent lightning in that cloud to the right; none of my shots captured it.
A short time later overhead the setting sun was putting high contrast on mammatus under a mostly dissipated anvil.