More tropical downpours hit the Caribbean

The busy Atlantic basin hurricane season continues with a formation alert for much of Central America.

More tropical downpours hit the Caribbean
The busy Atlantic basin hurricane season continues with a formation alert for much of Central America. [Al Jazeera]

This year’s very active hurricane season threatens to throw up another spell of damaging weather over the next few days.

Nicaragua is currently bracing for the possible formation of a tropical storm as a clutch of storms continues to gather in the western Caribbean.

The showers and thunderstorms associated with a broad area of low pressure have gradually become more organised recently.

The storms have gathered just off Nicaragua’s eastern coast, and according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), their proximity to land is likely to limit development, at least for a while.

Conditions are expected to be more favourable for the system to become more organised by the weekend as the system gradually moves north across the western side of the Caribbean.

The NHC is currently giving a 30 percent chance of the formation of a tropical storm within the next 48 hours. That risk goes up to 40 percent within the next five days.

Regardless of any development, heavy rain is likely to cause some disruption over parts of Central America and Cuba over the next few days.

Those rains have already begun. The Honduran town of Tela recorded 137mm of rain on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the town of Flores in Guatemala recorded 320mm of rain over a 24-hour period on Wednesday into Thursday.

The rains usually ease off at this time of the year, but it was even wetter at the international airport in Guatemala City where they had two months’ worth of rain.

A whopping 361mm of rain fell in just 24 hours. The October average is 130mm.

Source: Al Jazeera