The Best Months for Aerial Photography in Southern Arizona

Agents ask us when to list. We cannot answer that. What we can answer is when a property in Cochise County photographs well from 200 ft, because that follows the weather, and the weather here follows a calendar.

Below is that calendar, built from National Weather Service definitions, six years of data from the University of Arizona's AZMET weather station at Willcox Bench, and our own flight log. Where something is our judgement rather than a measurement, it says so.

The year in one table

Monsoon: 15 June to 30 September

The National Weather Service defines the monsoon as a fixed season, 15 June through 30 September, rather than waiting for the first storm. The rain usually arrives in early July and the heaviest storms sit over the mountains of central and south-eastern Arizona — the ranges that frame every listing in this county.

Three things about the monsoon matter for flying. Storms form in the early to mid afternoon. Thunderstorm wind gusts in Arizona, in the NWS's words, almost always exceed 40 mph, and the strongest straight-line gusts exceed 100 mph. And dust storms are most common early in the season, before the ground has been wetted down.

So from July to September we fly mornings and do not book afternoons. A 7 am launch on a July listing is usually in still, clear air; by 2 pm the same sky has an anvil over the Chiricahuas and an outflow boundary coming across the valley ahead of it. Humidity climbs sharply in July and August, and the air shows it — this is the haze season, and distant mountains go soft in a way they never do in October. That last observation is ours, not the NWS's.

The monsoon's gift arrives late. In our experience rangeland that was dust in June is green by mid August and stays green into October. A ranch or horse-property listing shot in late August looks like a different property from the same ground shot in May, and that is worth planning around if the seller has the choice.

Spring: the wind months

We pulled the raw daily records from the AZMET station at Willcox Bench for 2020 through 2025 and worked out, for each month, how often the station's recorded daily peak wind reached 20 mph. The pattern is not subtle.

Source: AZMET Willcox Bench daily files, 2020–2025, our arithmetic, wind converted from metres per second. The station measures near the ground on the open valley floor; our aircraft works at 200 to 400 ft, where wind is generally stronger. Treat these as a floor.

March, April and May produce a 20 mph day more often than not. The same months have, by the Western Regional Climate Center's account, the greatest number of clear days in the Arizona year — so the sky is perfect and the air is unusable, often on the same afternoon. June's number is higher still, but in our experience for a different reason: by June the wind is heat-driven, builds through the day and dies at night, which makes the early morning reliable in a way that a March wind behind a front is not.

Spring also brings the dust. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counts 143,907 acres of cropland in Cochise County, much of it on the floors of the Sulphur Springs and San Simon valleys, and a field ploughed and left bare in a spring wind event becomes a visibility problem for miles. In May 2016 ADOT and the Department of Public Safety closed more than 60 miles of I-10 between Willcox and the New Mexico line several times in a few weeks because of dust from 640 acres of recently ploughed farmland, and ended up hauling water to crust the surface. I-10 was shut in both directions east of Willcox for the same reason in March 2022. A listing downwind of fallow ground has a brown horizon on a windy April afternoon, and no edit fixes that.

Practically: spring listings get booked for first light, with a weather call the evening before, and we say at booking that one reschedule is likely. Dawn in April is often still, and the shoot is done by 9 am. A 3 pm appointment in April is a coin flip.

Winter: clear, calm, and the sun is in the wrong place

December and January are the stillest months in the data above, and the air is as clean as it gets. For a house, mid-day in winter is good flying.

The problem is geometry. At solar noon on 21 December the sun over Willcox reaches 34 degrees above the horizon. On 21 June it reaches 81 degrees. At 34 degrees a 10 ft wall throws a shadow about 15 ft long on its north side, at noon, with nothing to be done about it. Every north-facing yard, every courtyard, every wash with a cut bank is in shade all day. On a house that is manageable: shoot from the south and the shadows become modelling. On land it is not; a third of the ground is dark and the rest is the colour of a paper bag.

Winter also has the shortest day. On 15 December the sun sets at 17:16. We schedule winter day shoots between 10 am and 2 pm, and a winter twilight shoot is over by a quarter to six.

October and November

Everything above converges here. The monsoon has ended and left the grass green. The wind has dropped — October and November produce a 20 mph day about one day in five, against three in five in April. The humidity is gone and the ranges are sharp to the horizon. The sun at noon in mid October is still 49 degrees up, high enough that shadows are short but low enough that the ground has texture.

If a seller can choose when a ranch, a horse property or a rural home is photographed, this is the answer, and it is a six-week answer. By late November the grass has cured to tan, and by December the shadows have arrived.

How we handle wind

DJI publishes the Mavic 4 Pro's maximum wind speed resistance as 12 m/s, which is 26.8 mph. That is the figure at which the aircraft can still hold position; it is not the figure at which it takes a good photograph.

Our own rule, and it is a judgement rather than a regulation: we do not fly listings in gusts above roughly 20 mph. Below that the gimbal holds the horizon and video is smooth. Above it, stills are still sharp but video shows the aircraft fighting the air, hover drift makes long twilight exposures soft, and the margin between the forecast and the aircraft's limit at 300 ft gets thinner than we like with someone's house underneath. A mapping flight, flown in straight lines with no video, can tolerate a little more; a 90-second cinematic cut cannot.

So we check the forecast the evening before any shoot, call the client if the morning looks marginal, and move the appointment rather than fly it badly. Nobody is well served by a wobbling horizon delivered on time.

The short version

October and November for anything with land under it. Mid-day in winter for houses. First light for anything in spring or monsoon, with a reschedule expected. And in June, if the seller can wait eight weeks, wait.

What each package includes is on the real estate aerial media page. If you have a listing coming, send the address and target list date through the contact form and we will tell you which week the calendar favours.