Heavy rains normal for this time of year – Met Office |25 January 2013

For the past several weeks, heavy rains have been falling and the Met office told Seychelles Nation that the clouds which usually give Seychelles its rainy season have fallen in good formation this year, and has given us a lot of rain.

Principal Met officer Vincent Amelie said the normal average rainfall for January is around 400mm of rainfall, although for several years Seychelles had not been meeting this norm.
“This year we are lucky to be meeting this target, and all this rain is totally normal and forms part of our rainy season,” he said.

“The heavy rain that has fallen during these past few days only has in fact contributed over 50% of the total amount expected for an annual rainy season and we predict that there is more rain to come.”

He added that our annual rainy season usually goes on until March, and that the peak of the rainy season usually happens in January.

“In previous years when the rainfall had not been meeting its annual target of 400mm, we have reasons to believe that this was due to climate change, but we will still stick by our set target of 400mm of rainfall as the average for each rainy season, and this year we are experiencing what we consider as a typical rainy season for Seychelles,” he said.

In comparing statistics for previous individual months, in September the Met office recorded an impressive 207% of its usual rainfall for this month compared to the norm for every year.
October recorded 88% of the norm, November was a disappointing 56%, while December had 82% of rainfall.

Mr Amelie said Seychelles has now received 75-80% of its normal rainfall for this year’s rainy season, and that the place to have recorded the most rainfall so far is La Digue, which on Wednesday only received 227mm of rain.

“That is a lot of rain for La Digue, and we attribute this to a heavy and very dense formation of clouds which took place just above La Digue,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Public Utilities Corporation said that with all the rain water gathered, it has lifted all the water restrictions on Mahe, Praslin and La Digue for the moment. While all the smaller reservoirs around the country are full to capacity, the level of water in the La Gogue dam has increased dramatically to 70% from only 55% a few days ago.