Our pluvial year begins first of October. Until yesterday, this rainy season produced a meagre 3.0 mm of rain in early October. Since then, we have had about 70 days of drought, punctuated by a single rainfall of 0.8 mm, two or three days ago. This is totally unprecedented, November having zero precipitation anywhere on the island. Since records began in the 19th century, this has never been seen before. Some rainy season!
The drought was broken yesterday and we have had precipitation of 86.0 mm over the last 24 hours, accompanied by the mother and father of a thunderstorm. The monthly average for this location for December is 86.6 mm, so we had a month’s rain in one day. Of course, this rain was useless, falling on sunbaked land, so that the run off would be much greater than any rain collected in the reservoirs. At one moment, 35.6 mm of rain fell in one hour and 5.8 mm fell in 1 min!
Over the last 30 hours the barometer fell from 1020 to 990 hPa and it is just beginning to rise again. The latter figure is my lowest record for all time (since 2006!).
My weather forecast would seem to indicate odd showers over the next two days, but another massive storm on Monday night:
