Monsoon clouds hover above a southern Arizona neighborhood.
Monsoon Madness is back.
The Southwest monsoon is officially underway and weather watchers are again trying to guess how much rain will fall on Tucson and the rest of the region.
Zack Guido with the University of Arizona Institute for Resilience says his group of forecasters are challenging people to win their 4th annual competition.
"Whether they are weather enthusiasts or professional meteorologists, or just people that forecast just once a week or not at all, all of those individuals are playing our game," he said.
Players must accurately predict how much rain will fall on Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff; Albuquerque, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas each of the next three months. Guido notes there's no cost to enter and people can submit as many guesses as they want.
"We have people like me who spend a lot of time looking at the models and we have people like some of my friends who don't do that."
The top scoring player each of the three months receives a $300 dollar Amazon gift certificate and the overall winner gets another $300 gift card.
The contest drew more than 300 individual entrants last year, and this year it is open to team forecasting for the first time.
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