Good morning Bay Islands. For our official total for September, we’re putting Sandy Bay’s 3.16 inches in the books, but rain totals were all over the place across the islands, from 5 inches in Utila to 7-9 inches at Diamond Rock and Camp Bay and back down to 1.5 inches in Guanaja. Looking ahead, we’re about to enter our rainiest months of the year, but even in normal years, rainy season only starts in the second half of October. Right now the forecast doesn’t look especially rainy. Part of that is that the Atlantic basin has been dead for any sort of tropical storm and we usually get at least one nearby to give us some rain. So far that isn’t happening.
Many thanks to climate expert Zeke Hausfather for helping me cut through the noise with this year’s El Nino. I have looked at our rain records and compared with previous El Nino’s and found no clear trend. When you look at strong El Ninos (this years is the strongest on record by far) there is a small tendency toward it being drier than average (5 of 8 years, not 7 of 8 as the headline wrongly says). But the models are all forecasting a drier than average rainy season, and that is a strong indicator, with an average of 40 percent drier than normal. But I’m going to argue that’s not a bad thing. This El Nino has spared us ANY concern about hurricanes and I’ve always thought it a bit sad that our biggest tourist time of the year, when it’s cold up north, was so rainy. So if you’re in North America, this may be THE YEAR to book your trip to the Bay Islands, with fewer rainy northers. Even if we get only 60 percent of our normal rain that is still about 25 inches through January, which should keep most of our cisterns full.
