Wel­come rain­fall moved across T&T yes­ter­day, but the wet sea­son is still some weeks away as dry con­di­tions are set to re­turn lat­er to­day.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS), which had fore­cast­ed the rain event since last week, at­trib­uted the April show­ers to “low-lev­el wind con­ver­gence and in­creased mois­ture ad­vec­tion, to­geth­er with some en­hance­ment from a gen­er­al­ly south­west­er­ly flow in the up­per at­mos­phere”.

For the wet sea­son to be de­clared in T&T, a trop­i­cal wave or the In­tertrop­i­cal Con­ver­gence Zone (ITCZ) must tra­verse the coun­try, pro­duc­ing mea­sur­able rain­fall at the na­tion’s of­fi­cial cli­mate sta­tions at Crown Point and Pi­ar­co. No trop­i­cal waves are cur­rent­ly in the At­lantic, and the ITCZ re­mains well south of the re­gion.

T&T is emerg­ing from a very dry pe­ri­od. Both is­lands main­ly ex­pe­ri­enced be­low-av­er­age rain­fall for the last six months, with Feb­ru­ary be­ing one of the dri­est Feb­ru­arys on record at both Pi­ar­co and Crown Point.

While the coun­try did pick up some sig­nif­i­cant rain­fall to­tals, par­tic­u­lar­ly in north­east­ern Trinidad, there were no re­ports of flood­ing out­side of brief street floods on the East­ern Main Road in Ma­coya yes­ter­day morn­ing.

Al­though some more show­ers and iso­lat­ed thun­der­storms re­main fore­cast through this af­ter­noon, the TTMS said gen­er­al­ly fair and sun­ny con­di­tions are ex­pect­ed to re­turn from to­mor­row through the week­end. In their out­look for the next five days, the Met Of­fice fore­casts hot tem­per­a­tures, “up in­to the mid-30s of de­grees Cel­sius on some days”, and Sa­ha­ran Dust, which is cur­rent­ly at mild con­cen­tra­tions, to in­crease from Fri­day.

As con­di­tions be­come dry once more, the TTMS said, “We are still in the dry sea­son, and as the at­mos­phere be­gins to sub­se­quent­ly dry out once more, the prob­a­bil­i­ty for bush and brush fires, to­geth­er with the pos­si­bil­i­ty for land­fill and for­est fires, will again be­gin to rise. These are like­ly to con­tin­ue con­tribut­ing to the re­duc­tion in the air qual­i­ty at times.”