Hilo,
Hawaii,
United States
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Hilo has the dubious reputation as being the rainiest city in the US, with an average annual rainfall of 130 inches at sea level, and above 300 inches just six miles upslope from city limits. By contrast, the average annual rainfall in Portland, Oregon is around 40 inches. While 130 inches is a lot of rain, Hilo weather is typically quite pleasant with warm, sunny days and most of the rain falling at night, a pattern dictated by northeasterly trade winds. However, since we have been here, the weather has been anything but "normal;" it has either been exceedingly sunny with no rain, exceedingly cloudy with intense showers, unseasonably cool (average temperature for this time of year is 80 degrees, which it hasn't even approached for several weeks), or continuous downpour. Over the weekend (including Friday afternoon to early Monday morning) it rained 19.98 inches. TWENTY INCHES!!! That is roughly half the entire annual rainfall in Portland, in just one weekend. We understand that over Christmas last year it rained 30 inches over a similar timeframe. We have experienced tropical deluges before, with even harder rain, but not with this duration. In a typical tropical downpour the sky bursts open and dumps inches of water in a spigot of hail and raindrops, usually accompanied by claps of thunder and flashes of lightning-a dramatic event that lasts on the order of hours, not days. This latest event in Hilo had no thunder, no lightning, no hail even, but it just rained and rained. Hard. This is another thing we have noticed about the rain here, it packs a wallop. Even the mist will soak you as you briskly walk from your car across a parking lot to the shelter of a building. Where does 20 inches of rain go, you might ask? There are several drainage ditches in town, normally empty, that become raging rivers, as does the natural river running along the northern edge of town, the Wailuku River. The soccer fields on the bay front (strategically placed after the 1960 tsunami) get inundated. Large puddles form in lawns and other similar flat pieces of land. We ventured out during a brief lull in the deluge to take pictures of the Wailuku River, the outlet of which is about a block from our studio. We've included pictures of the same spots we took when we first got to town, during an unusually long dry spell, for comparison.
Rainbow Falls 1.19.09
Rainbow Falls 3.7.09
Travel update: Unfortunately the Yap trip has been pushed back to a date that Dan and I can't make it. So we are tentatively scheduled to leave Hilo on March 25th for Singapore. We'll be there for a day and will drop off the field gear we won't need in Australia. We'll then go to Australia, followed by visiting the Malaysian side of Borneo to look for additional field sites and get a better feel for the island as a whole. In mid-May we will meet up with Boone and the CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) scientists for data collection on Borneo, Sulawesi and Sumatra...subject to change of course.
