Rainfall Update

Lloyd Cripe lives in Palmira, which is close to Boquete.  Our climates are not the same; we're hotter and if I listen to the locals here, wetter.  Lloyd just emailed rainfall data for May, including a breakdown of yesterday and the past week.

Yesterday:    9 inches

Past 8 days:  26"

May so far:  40"

So I figure this is low end for us--we might have received more.

His comment was that "we really broke last year's record for May".  All I can say is that last year was the really wet year!  I'm also green with envy--he has all this lovely data and we don't!! (yet)

May is not over, and as I write, at 2:19 pm, rain is falling again after a partly cloudy morning.

Rainy Season Weather

West side of house, 4:29 pm, October 15, 2007.  Looking out from dog run attached to house.

My Irish buddy Will has asked a question about what the weather is like here in the rainy season.  Immediately I have to start out with the fact that it's going to vary some from area to area. For example, the Potrerillos area is considered to get more rain than does David; I think Boquete has about the same rainfall as we do, but at times they get what is called the bajareque, a fine mist/drizzle/light rain that comes down that valley when we're having good weather.  It's hard to say without hard data.  Lloyd Cripe has a Web site, Boqueteweather.org (sidebar) that reports the weather in and around Boquete, and has a year's worht of solid data.  While our friend Ricardo Espinosa keeps rain data, he does so manually and I haven't yet asked to see his records, which I imagine are in notebooks.  In October, we're purchasing the same weather station that Lloyd has, and we'll be able to compare rather nicely at least between Boquete and here.  David, of course, has official meteorological records that can be accessed pretty easily.

The Pacific side of the country does not get as much rain as the Caribbean side.  Everybody jokes that Bocas has two seasons:  wet and wetter.  

OK, that's one thing.  The second is that it's hard to talk about a "normal' year because that varies.

The rainy season here starts in April or May and runs through December or even part of January.  Most years, January through March is drought season--little to no rain.  Not this year.  We had enough rain so that I only had to water first-year trees and shrubs once.

Trying to strike some average:  usually, after the rainy season starts--usually--we start out with maybe 2-3 days of rain per week in the afternoon with lovely mornings.  It's the reason why May and June are my favorite months.  In mid-June, we have what the locals call "San Juan summer".  The feast of San Juan is June 19, and in most Latin American countries (especially Brasil), it's a big event.  Here, we get 2-3 weeks of dry, gorgeous weather.  In late July, the rains set in in earnest.

What happens after that is usually--usually--the mornings are sunny or at least high overcast and the rains come in the afternoon just about every day.  As the rainy season progresses, the time of day that the rains start gets closer and closer to noon.  September and October are normally the worst months.  Not only does it rain every day, but it's possible to have 3-4 days of nothing but rain.

And what rain!  The phrase "tropical downpour" must have been coined for Central America and the Caribbean, because by August, we really have the aguaseros regularly--the heavy downpours that can last for up to several hours where the rain comes down so heavily you can't see to the end of the hood of your car if you are so unfortunate as to be driving when it occurs.  We always try to get any driving done in the morning and really work hard at being back at the house by noon at the latest.  It's extremely dangerous on the roads.

By November, the rain usually starts to slacken off a bit, and December is pretty good.

That said, there are all kinds of variations on this theme.  But that's the "normal" pattern.  Because of this, our hottest month here is April, because by July and August, the afternoons are overcast and rainy, driving the temperature down.

And of course, as I sit here typing this post, we are having a weird combination of the low pressure variable rain bands along with an electrical storm!  Never let it be said that this area lacks drama.  Contrary to my last update on the previous rain post, the rain re-intensified.

 Glad you liked the picture, Will--just for you I uploaded the above picture which was taken last year on the west side of the house, looking out from the dog run.  I haven't cropped the picture so that you can get some idea of the length and volume of this stream of water ruuning down on the opposite side of the house from the earlier photo.  If there is suffficient resolution, you'll be able to see that it was still raining when I took the picture, on October 15 last year. Could have been taken today--both streams are running just as enthusiastically down the property.  It's been raining now for over 36 hours straight, maybe even longer.  The ground is utterly saturated.  Fortunately, we live on the lower slopes of the mountains, we don't live anywhere near a river, and both quebradas are both deep enough and far enough away that we have no danger to us.  That can not be said of Boquete; I've been wondering if they've had flooding from the river there.

Indeed, do bring your wellies!

Rain

We had an odd sort of rain experience here, over 24 hours of what sure seemed like rain bands--heavy (but not aguasero) rains, then a dry interval, then rain again.  To me, it seemed like everything I've ever read about rain in hurricanes which, fortunately, I've never experienced.  No wind, though.  And definitely coming from the south.

Then today I received an email warning of potential flash flooding in mountainous regions of Central America thanks to a massive tropical depression just off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  Tropical depressions, of course, are the forerunners of hurricanes, so it made sense.  Thus the warning of flooding.

We don't need storms like this to provide drama through water.  Last year was a particularly wet one, with flooding in Panamá in areas that rarely experience overflowing rivers.  We had several flash floods in a quebrada near us.  The picture shows the stream that forms from runoff water in back of the house that is diverted to the east side and runs down a little gully that passes underneath our driveway.  I took it from our side door while it was still raining.

We always have runoff like this in September and October during the height of the rainy season.  Last year, though, it occurred far more frequently than in previous years.  Yesterday, thanks to the rain band phenomenon, we didn't have that kind of severe runoff.

The tropical depression was supposed to move north yesterday, and it finally did--the rain stopped about 3 am this  morning.

Addition and correction: 

Latest satellite image shows that we're probably not done with the system yet.  Evidently it's gotten bigger.  True to report, just as Mary was telling me this, the rain started up again.

Yet another addendum:  the rain is much worse than yesterday--the rain is lasting longer between intervals, the intervals are shorter in duration, and it is coming down much, much harder, although in waves.  I have a feeling that instead of dry intervals, all we're going to see is a lessening in intensity, almost like surf.  I'm glad we went to David yesterday, because I wouldn't dream of driving in this rain--suicidal.

Lloyd Cripe, whose Web site (Boqueteweater.com) is on the sidebar, has just cracked that if this keeps going on, we're all going to have tropical depression!

Another update:

La Prensa this morning reported that the Panamanian Weather Bureau has issued an alert for heavy rains and possible flooding and mud slides until 4 pm today for the provinces of Chiriquí, Bocas del Toro, Veraguas, Los Santos, Herrera, Panamá, and the Ngobe Buglé Comarca.  Yesterday's rains caused flooding and mud slides in the capital.  Another article reported that Bocas del Toro had been cut off from the rest of the country by land because of a mud slide on the highway, but our friends (whose son works there) tell us that that's so common as to be unremarkable.  However, it's one of the reasons why he hates working there.  He likes to come home for the weekends and sometimes he can't due to problems like this.

Llloyd Cripe reports that he's recorded 3.9" of rain since midnight over near Boquete.  I'm really anxious to get our weather station in October.  Our rain bands are decreasing in intensity and frequency.  We've got our usual streams (one of them in the above picture) in both gullies on each side of the house, but they're lessening in volume.

La Lluvia

The rains have arrived--not necessarily early but steadily. We've had rain in the afternoon almost every day since the first of April.

Great for the plants! And I'm in full swing as far as setting out new ones are concerned. To date, I've managed to get into the ground 2 nice-sized bougainvillea, 3 papaya trees and one mamon chino.

It also looks like the preliminary work on stopping the roof leaks has been successful. We really had a downpour--an aguacero--a few days ago, and the usual places were either dry or had just a few drops. Now to get the other half of the roof.

Anyone who was here during last year's rainy season I'm sure remembers the problems from the unusually heavy rains we had then. There were floods in parts of Panama that hadn't seen any in a hundred years. October, our wettest month here, was particularly bad last year. The photo on the upper left was taken on October 15, while it was still raining, from just outside our side door. There's a bit of a gully not that far away from the house; there's a culvert over the driveway. The picture shows the veritable little river of water pouring dow through the culvert to spread out and saturate the land on the other side of the driveway--it became a swamp last year. While we always have some outflow, this was particularly impressive.

The 2nd picture was taken on the other side of the house, from just inside the covered area of the dog run, and shows the torrent that was pouring down the other gully we have. Last year was so bad that for the first time we had erosion in that area. I've already taken steps to prevent more; the scoured ditch has been filled with small stones and we've dumped dirt on top. That system works very well.

To my amazement, we had a flash flood in the quebrada that borders the pine woods that we used to walk through with the dogs. Actually, there were probably 2 or 3. They took out the bridge, just washing away the fill and hard pack and exposing the concrete tubos that serve as a culvert. That quebrada is NOT a year-round creek. We don't normally see water in it until September. But on at least two back-to-back days, 15+ feet of water came roaring down that little gully, taking away almost everything except the hundred-lb rocks and the concrete tubos. It did at least leave behind a perfectly useless retaining wall.

We had to wait until January of this year for that bridge to be rebuilt--which it was, in the same exact manner that washed out before. But that's Panamá. They just gamble that the rain won't be as bad this year as it was last year. And who knows--maybe it won't.