A Neotropical Savanna

Sunday afternoon 14 inches of rain fell on Boquete, Panama, in the hours between 2 and 9 PM. Most of that was concentrated between 3 and 6 in the afternoon.

The top graph is of wind direction, with North at both the top and the bottom and South in the center, to accommodate 360 degrees stretched out in a straight line. The bottom graph is rainfall rate in inches per hour. Note the scale – maximum is 5 inches per hour. Most home rain gauges capture up to 5 inches, assuming it will be read once per day.

Boquete is not here where we are, but the personal weather station that recorded these data is located 6 miles due north of us and uphill by 1740 feet (530 m).

The river that flows through Boquete flooded, of course, and a resident of the area has posted photos of the damage at Picasa.

For us, on that day, the intense rains were of much shorter duration and occurred at the time of a secondary peak in the Boquete rain. Note that our scale goes to only 4.5 inches/hour.

This particular episode may have been related to a trough located near the Intertropical Convergenze Zone and possibly also by the activity of Tropical Storm Frank in the Pacific.

Whew.

While some parts of the world swelter and others suffer from severe drought, we continue to be deluged with rain. It’s most likely due to La Niña, we know, but that doesn’t make it any easier, and we really do wish we could spread this wealth around.

In July we broke the monthly record for rainfall since Señor Espinosa started keeping track of rain in our area in 1992. The previous record – for September 1999 – was 55.3 inches. This July we exceeded that amount by exactly 4 inches; our total was 59.3 inches.

It rained 29 of the 31 days in July and on one of those days, it rained more than five inches.

Meanwhile, our average temperature has been 71 degrees F.

We have a few more tidbits at our weather archives page.

There’s a fine edition of the carnival of plants, Berry Go Round, at Brainripples. Jade Blackwater has presented so many interesting posts and web sites that I’ll be returning to the carnival several times this month, just to be sure I don’t miss anything. You may find yourself doing the same. It’s called Berry Go Round 30 – Come Together.

In this rainiest of La Niña rainy seasons, everything in the pine forest where I walk the dogs is green, green, green. A spot of red, then, really catches the eye, even when it’s against the clay dirt of a forestry road.

There are lots of sprawling, scrambling vines around, but this one I like because of its red inflorescence and also its trifoliate leaves. When I took a clipping or two home and and opened my trusted identification manual by Gentry in hand, it didn’t take long to come up with the family and genus name of this woody vine.

Leaves alternate and compound

The leaves are divided into three leaflets, which makes them compound leaves, and they are not opposite each other on the stem – they work their way up the stem on alternate sides.

This combination of alternate, compound leaves is most often found in the legume (Fabaceae) family, but legume leaves have smooth edges or margins. The margins of the leaves on this woody vine are toothed, or serrated.

The toothed edges place it in one of three possible families: the soapberry (Sapindaceae), the cucumber (Cucurbitaceae), or the grape (Vitaceae) family.

Crucial tendrils

To distinguish the families from each other, Gentry uses the configuration of the tendrils. Soapberry tendrils are bifurcated or forked. Cucumber tendrils are divided, spirally coiling, and make a right angle with the base of the leaf stalk. Grape tendrils arise on the stem opposite the leaf stalk – in the exact position another leaf would be if these leaves were opposite rather than alternate.

So which tendrils do we have here?

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