In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s raining this month. October/November is the second intermonsoon, when the whole country experiences high wind and rains. These days in Colombo it usually starts raining in the afternoon or after work, like the monsoon has a day job in India. At the YAMU office we can sometimes see the rain clouds rolling in before it rains on us, as you can see in the video and photos here.
If you’re wondering when it will stop, we graphed some average historical rainfall from Wikipedia.
October has the most amount of rainy days and the third most amount of rainfall. Who’s first in rainfall? That’s November, coming up. While this rain comes too late to help the many Sri Lankans effected by drought, it should at least boost our hydro generation. For most people in Colombo, however, it just floods the roads, creates traffic and causes soggy feet and unhappy dogs.
Why Intermonsoon And Not Monsoon?
Good question. Around July India heats up and moist air from the ocean rushes in, making it rain in Mumbai, Delhi, etc. That’s their monsoon. Around September/October northern India cools off and dumps the rain on us.
Our monsoons are the Yala monsoon after Avurudu (May-August) and the Maha monsoon (October-January). You could say we’re in the Maha monsoon now, but in practice this is called the intermonsoon (the most rainy months, October and November).
