The June Report is up. The XXXIII Climate Forum for Central America made, in April, a remarkably accurate prediction for rainfall in Chiriqui during the months of May through July. As you’ll see in the report, both May and June records showed exactly what they thought will happen. If they’re right for July as well, their batting average will be 100%.
Meantime, we’re moving into the daily patterns we expect during the rainy season. Although rain usually slacks off in July, when it does arrive, it moves up from the south (from the Pacific). We sometimes hear it marching up the mountain. Yesterday we saw this:
The typical rainy season shelf of clouds hanging out over the mountain. Although it’s not clear in this photo, we were able to see the Chiriqui lowlands, including Mesa Chercha, in the white area below the rain cloud.
About 20 minutes after this photo was taken, it started raining at our place. We had 0.6 inches of rain from that episode.
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- Saturday, July 2, 2011 (eaststreetweatherblog.wordpress.com)
Hi Mary,
Nice blog! I like your use of weather charts and satellite imagery–something I should consider for my own blog. You certainly have some interesting weather in Panama, though you don’t get to report snowfall and all the other nice mixes of precipitation that we get here in Vermont! Are you noticing any extremes happening recently? We’re certainly getting some here–record flooding and damaging winds. One has to think about climate change…
John
Hi John, and thanks very much for visiting. If you had asked me about extremes last year, I would probably have answered at length about our La Niña. We had, conservatively, 22 feet of rain in 2010. We are in one of the rainiest parts of Panama, but our average here is 15 feet per year.
I’m sorry to hear about the record flooding and damaging winds in lovely Vermont. I have this unfounded impression that the tropics on the whole will stay closer to equilibrium during climate change than other parts of the world will. Do you have any thoughts on that?