Jean-Marc Ram­per­sad

Cli­mate Change Ed­i­tor

jean-marc.ram­per­sad@guardian.co.tt

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS) has de­clared the start of the 2025 Wet Sea­son, af­ter record­ing rain­fall in­di­rect­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the In­ter-Trop­i­cal Con­ver­gence Zone (ITCZ) that af­fect­ed the coun­try over the week­end.

In a re­lease, the TTMS urged the pub­lic, rel­e­vant agen­cies and min­istries to adopt mea­sures to mit­i­gate the po­ten­tial im­pacts of the Wet and Hur­ri­cane sea­sons.

It said, “While the main ax­is of the ITCZ re­mains south of our lat­i­tude, deep trop­i­cal mois­ture as­so­ci­at­ed with its broad­er en­vi­ron­ment has ex­tend­ed north­ward over Trinidad and To­ba­go, con­tribut­ing to in­creased at­mos­pher­ic in­sta­bil­i­ty.”

A Yel­low Lev­el Ad­verse Weath­er Alert was is­sued on Fri­day (May 16) in an­tic­i­pa­tion of im­pact­ful rain­fall on the week­end. The alert came in­to ef­fect at 6 pm on Sat­ur­day and was ex­tend­ed to 6 pm yes­ter­day.

Thun­der­storms and lin­ger­ing, per­sis­tent rain­fall were ex­pe­ri­enced across Trinidad from ear­ly Sun­day and by mid-morn­ing, there were sev­er­al re­ports of flash flood­ing across the is­land as small­er wa­ter­cours­es be­came over­whelmed.

His­tor­i­cal­ly, the wet sea­son runs from June to De­cem­ber, with May and Jan­u­ary typ­i­cal­ly con­sid­ered tran­si­tion­al months be­tween the sea­sons. In re­cent times, the start of the wet sea­son has been de­clared in May. The At­lantic Hur­ri­cane Sea­son is al­so con­tained with­in our wet sea­son, as it ex­tends from June 1 to No­vem­ber 30.

Sev­er­al out­looks for the hur­ri­cane sea­son have al­ready been is­sued, with most fore­cast­ing a ‘near-nor­mal’ sea­son which has an av­er­age of 14 named storms, sev­en hur­ri­canes and three ma­jor hur­ri­canes (based on da­ta from 1991 to 2020).

For T&T's area of in­ter­est (the area to our east where de­vel­op­ing sys­tems may af­fect T&T), the TTMS projects ap­prox­i­mate­ly four sys­tems to de­vel­op.

Fur­ther­more, the first trop­i­cal wave of the sea­son has been con­firmed by the TTMS just off the African West Coast, and is ex­pect­ed to pass over T&T on Sun­day (May 25), based on cur­rent pro­jec­tions.

The TTMS al­so not­ed that T&T usu­al­ly ex­pe­ri­ences peak Sa­ha­ran Dust con­cen­tra­tions in June. These dust plumes can neg­a­tive­ly af­fect air qual­i­ty and even hin­der thun­der­storm de­vel­op­ment.