| September 1, 2010 | No. 33 |
I posted the August 2010 weather data this morning for the Palmira Weather Station. We recorded 38.09 inches of rain for the month of August and as of today there is a total of 133.46 inches of rain for the year. This is 23.76 inches more rain this month than we had a year ago August 2009 (13.73 inches). We had some rain on 30 days of the month and averaged over an inch a day. We are definitely getting more rain this year than we had last year.
The big news this month was the flooding we had on August 22, 2010. A lot of rain fell over the span of 4 hours causing flooding in parts of the Boquete District. We recorded about 7 inches of rain at the Palmira Station from 2:00pm to 6:00pm. The river Caldera quickly built-up and caused significant damage in the Palo Alto area. Mark Heyer captured some very good photos and posted them. Mark is an excellent energetic photographer who got out there for several days and documented damage and the initiation of repair efforts. Thanks Mark for your efforts and contribution to our information. You can see his photos at this link. There were other areas of damage, but all-in-all a lot less damage than we had in the 2008 flooding.
I had some problems with the Palmira Weather Station which have now been corrected. Starting in mid June the rain measuring system seemed to be reporting more rain than we actually had. Steve Sarner initially pointed this out to me and he was right. Others mentioned that some of the numbers appeared excessive. I initially thought it was just the heavy rains that we were getting. I had confidence in the station which has been very reliable for 4+ years. Ater discussing this with Steve again last week, I went to work to see if there was in fact a problem and what it was. I manually measured the rainfall for a couple of days and found that the station was recording about 50% more rain than it should, especially when it rained heavily. I contacted the very helpful tech support at WeatherHawk and they promptly guided me through the troubleshooting and repairs. There was a problem with the hardware which was corrected. The gauge was recalibrated and we are back in business. We then made corrections to the database. The current readings are now accurate and the 2010 climate data table has been corrected. You can now trust the data. The rainfall numbers for the months of June, July and August now look better, but continue to reflect a heavy rainfall year. Thanks to all that helped remedy this problem. I will now make routine maintenance checks to make sure we are getting accurate rainfall measures.
Don't forget that you can also check the weather at the Portrerillos WeatherHawk Station and see comparisons with Palmira. So far Portrerillos is reporting 226.5 inches of rain for the year which is significantly more than Palmira.
We are entering into the last 2 big months of the rainy season, September and October. Make sure you have the umbrellas ready and in good repair. You may not need to close them, just keep them open and ready. They probably won't dry-out. You might also want to consider building a small Ark just in case. Regardless, don't forget that the beautiful green of the forest and the name rainforest is not by accident!
Lloyd Cripe