“To put it in perspective, we recorded at the airport, and this is perhaps one of the most reliable stations that we have, we recorded about 185 mm of rainfall over the past 12 hours, and that is extremely high; the rainfall average for this station is around 190 mm for the month of August,” Chief Meteorologist Ronald Gordon explained.
BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Aug. 18, 2022
For the past two days, a tropical wave barreling through Central America has dumped an overwhelming amount of rain over the country—flooding large portions of Belize City and compromising the structural integrity of roads. The weather outlook is for less rain going into the next few days as the system makes its way from northern Guatemala into southeastern Mexico and eventually into the Bay of Campeche, where it is expected to slowly develop into a low-pressure system. While it is expected that there will be significantly less rain as the system moves away from us, the system, which crossed over the country last night and early this morning, has left in its wake flooded streets and what appears to be a new record for rainfall in the month of August.
The Chief Meteorologist, Ronald Gordon, referred to the system as a strong tropical storm producing mesoscale conductive systems—basically thunderstorms that continue to redevelop.
The Ladyville area saw 7 inches of rain between midnight and midday, as can be seen by the videos of the area posted on social media. Luckily, at this time the peak of activity is behind us, and better weather is expected within the coming days.
When asked about the widespread localized flooding and its connection to the high volumes of rainfall within just the last two days, Gordon said, “It’s very interesting. I would say that we have been seeing these exceptionally high amounts of rainfall occurring in these very short periods of time, and of course that would lead to the type of flooding that you see. Typically you would expect the rainfall to be more uniformly distributed across the month, but we are seeing in these recent trends that we get these torrential downpours occurring over a very short period of time.”
He explained that typically the country receives the most rainfall in July and October, and in August the most thunderstorms are recorded, along with a two-week dry spell.
“We haven’t seen much of that this year in terms of the rainfall, but looking forward, the end of August again from the record is not typically a dry period. The maaga season, as I refer to it, is mostly at the beginning of the month, so if we use the past as any guidance, it would indicate to us that most likely we will be seeing more rainfall activity going forward,” Gordon said.
So far this year, only three named storms have been recorded—in contrast to the intense hurricane activity seen in the past two Atlantic Hurricane Seasons, during which the list of named storms was exhausted.
Chief Meteorologist Gordon noted, “And actually we have not seen anything since around June, and that is not totally unusual, because even last year where we had so many storms, July actually saw none. However, we are approaching the end of August, or at least the last three weeks in August, and so far the tropics remain relatively quiet.”
He said that this system that caused the heavy rains over Belize was being monitored for development but it did not advance to another stage of development before making landfall. He added, however, that there is a chance for it to develop as it moves toward northern Mexico.
He then went on to caution, “It only takes one storm, even if you are having an inactive season so to speak, and of course it does not take a tropical storm, hurricane, or even a tropical depression, to cause devastation as we just say – a strong tropical wave can produce torrential rainfall and has a significant impact on populations, and with that, I remind our residents to be prepared as we enter the peak of the hurricane season.”