Sunday afternoon 14 inches of rain [see update, below] 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.
Update – 6 Sep 2010. Boquete Weather Watchers has published a correction to their 14-inch figure. It turns out their rain gauge was out of calibration. They’ve estimated that they received about 7 inches of rain on the day of August 22. That’s about what we got. Their rainfall graph is still correct for relative rain rate – it’s just that the scale is way off. Lesson learned for rain gauge calibration. We’re working on ours now.
Still, 7 inches is a lot of rain in one day. And the floods did happen.
there must of been a hole in the clouds over boquete last sunday, we only had 3.5ml and it didn’t start raining until 6pm. i didn’t record when it stopped but think it was only a couple of hours.
355mm so far this month
4 days w/o measurable precipitation
norm : ))~
n 8°31′ 58.34
w82°40′ 23.31