Research into the sensitivity and vulnerability of urban water systems in Arizona reveals that managers are more concerned about factors such as population growth projections, economic trends, and revenue flows. Reliance on groundwater resources in many cases obscures recognition of any direct impact of precipitation on water supply. Given the low level of perceived climate risk among many providers interviewed for this study, it would seem unlikely that climate information would be needed. However, pockets of sensitivity and vulnerability to climatic impacts do exist in the four study areas covered in this study.

Conventional wisdom often views the urban water sector as being among the more sensitive sectors in the arid U.S. Southwest. To test this assumption, the Climate Assessment Project for the Southwest analyzed the water budgets of five Arizona cities to determine how severe the impacts would be from the deepest one-, five-, and ten-year droughts on record. Case study sites for the analysis included the Phoenix Active Management Area, Tucson Active Management Area, Santa Cruz Active Management Area, and the Benson and Sierra Vista subwatersheds of the San Pedro River.

This paper summarizes the current state of knowledge concerning the climate of the Southwest. Low annual precipitation, clear skies, and year-round warm weather over much of the Southwest are due in large part to a quasi-permanent subtropical high-pressure ridge over the region. However, the Southwest is located between the mid-latitude and subtropical atmospheric circulation regimes, and this positioning relative to shifts in these regimes is the fundamental reason for the region's climatic variability. El Niño, which is an increase in sea surface temperature of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean with an associated shift of the active center of atmospheric convection from the western to the central equatorial Pacific, has a well developed teleconnection with the Southwest, usually resulting in wet winters. La Niña, the opposite oceanic case of El Niño, usually results in dry winters for the Southwest. Another important oceanic influence on winter climate of the Southwest is a feature called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which has been defined as temporal variation in sea surface temperatures for most of the Northern Pacific Ocean. The major feature that sets climate of the Southwest apart from the rest of the United States is the North American monsoon, which, in the US, is most noticeable in Arizona and New Mexico. Up to 50% of the annual rainfall of Arizona and New Mexico occurs as monsoonal storms from July through September.