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"You gotta cook before it rains," says atmospheric physicist Christopher Castro.

If you're looking for a redeeming factor in the weather we're having, that's about it. We're cookin', and our overheated landscape eventually will lure some storms to the area.

We've already seen plenty of clouds building over the mountains, but so far they've brought only a slight reduction in temperatures and a lot of trouble over the weekend — lightning strikes that triggered wildfires on the eastern side of the Rincon Mountains, high winds that toppled power poles near Douglas, and dust storms in Cochise County.

These are the classic symptoms of the "ramp-up" phase of the monsoon, said meteorologist Erik Pytlak of the National Weather Service. It's a dangerous time of dry lightning, dust storms and microbursts.

There is a chance — a slim one — that Tucson will receive some rain late this week, meteorologist Glenn Lader said in a midday briefing at the weather service office on Monday. He added a 10 percent chance of thunderstorms to the Tucson forecast for Wednesday and through the weekend.

That means, meteorologist Pytlak warned, there's a 90 percent chance each day that it won't rain at your house.

"Raining at your house" is, of course, the unofficial gauge of the beginning of the monsoon.

Pytlak and the weather service won't hazard an official stab at the start of really rainy weather.

By the weekend, a high-pressure ridge keeping the moisture south of us will be centered right over Tucson, Lader said. That means continued hot and dry weather for us. But it also means that the ridge is moving north toward where it needs to be to trigger the onset of daily monsoon thunderstorms.

Castro's research group, in the University of Arizona's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, is using an experimental model for predicting the movement of the monsoon and holding to an earlier prediction that the rains will come early to Tucson this year.

By early, Castro explained last week, he means late June or early July.

"We're looking at this weekend as the period when the moisture will begin to increase in this region," Stephen W. Bieda, a member of Castro's research group, said Monday.

That should bring wet thunderstorms to the mountains, Bieda said, but not necessarily rain to the valley.

So there you have it.

Rain is coming.

When will it come to your house?

Sooner or later.