In January of 2011, we dove directly from Panama’s wettest year to a quite dry month at the height of the dry season. We recorded rain in only three days in January although there were days when we felt a trace of rain too small to be detected by our rain sensor. Our maximum rainfall for any one day was just under one inch, which means that that one day (January 3) accounted for most of the rain during the entire month. You may click on the table to enlarge it.
(Download a comma-separated version.)
The average rainfall recorded by Ricardo Espinosa over a 16-year period is 1.8 inches, so our rainfall for this January was well under average.
Nevertheless, it was actually more rain than we received in January 2010, when we had less than a half-inch of rain, all of which fell on one day:
Continuing with the other observations shown, year over year, this January was a touch cooler, slightly more humid, a little less sunny, and less windy than last January.
If you’ve been following our rain gauge saga, you may be interested to learn that this month’s rainfall as recorded by the WeatherHawk was not significantly different from that recorded by our manual gauge. Score: WeatherHawk = 1.0 inches; manual = 0.93 inches. These are so close that I’m letting the WeatherHawk reading stand as is. Later this week, Lloyd Cripe will be helping me install a new gauge sent to us by the WeatherHawk people. We’ll continue our comparison and report what happens.
In a nutshell, then, January 2011 was a great month in Potrerillos Arriba. We pretty much dried out from last year’s rain and were able to enjoy some fine tropical weather.
Update: Lloyd has posted his January report for Boquete. They had less rain than we did but more wind. You might like to see his take why this was so.
Thanks for the great job. Now…. have you any info as to what the next month or two will be like (rainfall) ? Thanks.
Michael, What can I say? Toward the end of 2010, Panama’s meteorological service suggested we might have more rain than usual during the 2011 dry season. We didn’t in January, obviously, but as I write it’s raining pretty hard in Potrerillos.
If you go to the “About Our Rain” page at our main weather site and scroll about half-way down the page, you’ll see a graph of average rainfall for each month of the year, followed by a table showing on the bottom rows both average and maximum for each month. February has an average of 1.7 inches and an historical maximum of 7.1 inches. That’s the best I can do.
Thanks for commenting!