In Depth · September 9, 2026

Two new sections: Life in the Desert, and What Sold

Tucson Daily Brief now publishes two records built entirely from official files: a daily measure of heat, water, sky, and power across the Tucson area, and a weekly account of every home sale recorded in Pima County. Here is what each one is, where its numbers come from, and how to send corrections.

Life in the Desert

Life in the Desert is a standing page that measures four things: heat, water, sky, and power. For each it shows the number today, the season so far against prior years, and the long record, on charts that go back as far as the instruments do. It is updated twice a day.

What it shows as of this week:

• Tucson's first 100-degree day of 2026 was March 19, the earliest since the airport's record begins in 1946. The previous earliest was April 11, 2025. Through Sept. 7 the city has had 76 days at or above 100, and highs are running 3.3 degrees above the 1991–2020 normal.
• Lake Mead stood at 1,038.9 feet on Sept. 8, down 17.5 feet in a year and below the first Colorado River shortage line. The page charts every day since Hoover Dam began filling in 1935.
• Solar made up 12.8 percent of the electricity Tucson Electric Power generated itself this year, up from 7.3 percent in 2025. Coal's share was 49.8 percent in 2022 and is 22.3 percent this year.
• The Pima County Regional Flood Control District operates 128 rain gauges across the county. The page reads all of them every hour.

The numbers come from the agencies that take the measurements:

• The National Weather Service and NOAA, for the daily temperature and rainfall record at Tucson International Airport, and for active alerts.
• The Bureau of Reclamation, for Lake Mead's daily elevation.
• The U.S. Geological Survey, for the stream gauges on the Santa Cruz River and Rillito Creek. The Santa Cruz gauge at downtown Tucson has daily readings back to 1915.
• The Pima County Regional Flood Control District, for rainfall and wash stage at its gauge network.
• The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality's air-quality monitors, published through AirNow.
• Tucson Electric Power's hourly demand and generation reports to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, every hour since 2015.
• Tucson Water's service advisories, archived since June 2026. The utility publishes only the current list.

Some of these sources publish only a current reading: Tucson Water's advisory list, the flood-control district's gauge network, AirNow's hourly air readings, and the weather service's hourly observations. Tucson Daily Brief archives those so a history exists. The long records for temperature, Lake Mead, the stream gauges, and the grid come from the agencies' own archives, assembled on one page. A 90-second video version, Under the Sun, is published every Saturday.

What Sold

What Sold is a weekly page, published Mondays, covering every home sale recorded in Pima County: the median price countywide and by town, the share of buyers who paid cash, who came from out of state, and who bought a rental or second home, the median by ZIP code, and the week's largest sales in each town on a map. The first edition, for the week of Aug. 3 to 9, counts 203 sales at a median price of $390,000; 24 percent were cash purchases and 40 percent involved a buyer or seller with an out-of-state address.

The source is the Pima County Assessor. Every sale in the county is reported to the Assessor on an affidavit of property value, and the Assessor publishes the full file nightly. Tucson Daily Brief archives it, with records back to 2023. The page counts only sales the Assessor validates as ordinary market sales, and excludes transfers between related parties, sales under duress, bundles of five or more parcels, and anything under $20,000. Recording lags a sale by weeks, so each week is published once it is at least two weeks old, and each page carries the date its figures were last updated.

The rules the page follows:

• The week's largest sales are listed with their addresses, which the county publishes. All other figures are reported by town or ZIP code, never by individual property.
• Owner names appear only for entities that hold ten or more houses, and only when there is a story that requires them. Individual homeowners are not named.
• Eviction figures, when added, will be county-level monthly counts. No case-level records will be published.

How both pages are made

No AI model writes any number on either page. The figures are read from the agencies' files by code, the charts are drawn from those figures, and each page ends with a line naming its sources. Where a page relies on a rule, such as which sales count as market sales, the rule is stated on the page. The daily brief, by contrast, is drafted by a language model and says so at the bottom of every edition.

Both pages cover the whole metro: Tucson, Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita, South Tucson, and unincorporated Pima County, which includes the Catalina Foothills, Vail, Green Valley, and Catalina.

Corrections and feedback

These are first editions. If a number looks wrong, if a chart would be more useful cut a different way, or if there is a measurement that should be here and isn't, use the Talk to Us page or write to editor@tucsondailybrief.com. Corrections are published on the page they correct.

Reported and written by Nicholas De Leon, with research and drafting assistance from Claude Fable 5.1; published at 8:39 PM MST on September 9, 2026. Read more about how this is made.