Warming sea temperatures, El Nino, Crown of Thorn Starfish. After all of these threats to reef health, it’s no wonder Maldive reefs have been struggling. And now a fourth (!) assailant entered the scene – Indian Ocean Dipole. The BBC describes the IOD, aka “The Indian Ocean El Nino” (“Indian Ocean Dipole – What Is It?”):
“Temperatures in the eastern part of the ocean oscillate between warm and cold compared with the western part, cycling through phases referred to as “positive”, “neutral” and “negative”. The dipole’s positive phase this year – the strongest for six decades – means warmer sea temperatures in the western Indian Ocean region, with the opposite in the east.”
“Mangrove forests enhance Small Island Developing States’ resilience to climate change, yet in 2020, a mangrove dieback impacted ~ 25% of mangrove-containing islands in the Maldives…We attribute this dieback to salinity stress driven by record-high sea levels in 2020, linked to an extreme positive Indian Ocean Dipole event.”
July seems to cause a particular amount of consternation with guests who read weather forecasts of nothing but rain for days on end and fear that their trip-of-a-lifetime will be a wash-out. I’ve already posted a piece clarifying the usually modest impact rain has in July after my 2019 Tour, but we enjoyed another particularly pronounced example of the “passing shower” and thought it would be helpful to post it. While the rain cloud in the video below did miss our island, on another day we did get hit square on with a 20-minute downpour pelting it down with quite strong winds. We were quite impressed with the nonplussed children in the pool who weren’t phased in the least and continued their watery frolicking made all the more watery during the mini-rainstorm.
The storm was part of a passing front which we looked up on the satellite weather website (see above). One of the benefits of being in the middle of the ocean is that there are no mountains to block ort dry land to slow down passing weather. So if you do get hit, you can usually count on it passing right over fairly quickly.
Per ritual, we checked the weather.com forecast for the Maldives the week before we departed. We tend to visit in July and pretty much the standard forecast is “Thunderstorms” EVERY day. But this time, several of the days showed the graphic above – pretty much a perfect depiction of Maldives weather in July. It combines in a single JPEG rain, cloud, thunder, sun. It’s basically the meteorological equivalent of saying “hell if we have a clue?!?”
One would think this profusion of thunderstorm forecasts would spark trepidation for our keenly anticipated trip to the tropical sun. It certainly does for a number of TripAdvisor Maldives Forum posters who fear their trip of a lifetime is going to be spoiled when they see these predictions. But, as I have described numerous times, you have to know how to interpret these forecasts.
When it says “Thunderstorms”, it doesn’t mean that thunder and lightning will be raining down on you from dawn till dusk. In fact, in many cases, the predicted storms hit at night when you are tucked comfily in your cozy villa and when you wake the sun is breaking through the clouds to dry up the puddles littering the sand-scape. The thing is that most of these storms come in quite isolated “little black rain clouds” (as Winnie the Pooh would say). Sometimes we entertain ourselves sipping cocktails and watching these storms approach our island and placing bets as to if it will hit us. It gets closer and closer with the sheets of rain becoming more and more visible. Sometimes it just bypasses us completely. Other times, it hits us full on and we scamper for cover while it passes over for a few minutes.
The video below is a classic example of one of these isolated “showers” we filmed at Faarufushi. We had just emerged from snorkelling (so a bit damp already) and the heavens just opened up on us. Strangely, the day was quite sunny and when you looked all around you saw plenty of blue sky. It’s just that one particularly sodden cloud decided to dump its precipitation on us then and there.
As I was flying amidst these mid-summer clouds themselves, I perused the Trans Maldivian Airways Magazine “Island Skies” piece from Eleonora Fiorini titled “It’s Always the Right Time to Visit the Maldives”. He starts off noting himself “Bruno’s father used to visit the Maldives islands every year for a month in July, and every time, he never had more than just a handful of consecutive days of rain.” The article goes on to look at Bruno’s meteorological study of the area explaining why Maldives weather is “basically nice all year round”. ]
First of all he noted that the Maldivian weather is, by definition, unstable saying “The climate at the Equator is like a boiling pot, and you have to guess where the next bubble will come up” (and micro”storms” like the shower in the video below is a perfect example of a little bubble of weather).
Constant Low Atmospheric Pressure – “first index of weather instability”
Surrounded by Hot Water and Humidity – “it is enough that the atmospheric pressure drops slightly for the air around to raise enormous quantities of moisture from the ocean, dragging them into the atmosphere where they quickly condense generating clouds and downpours in a short time.”
But what the equatorial conditions do to volatility, they also do to moderation:
No Coriolis Effect – “…Which allows huge amounts of energy to be stored in the atmosphere, no hurricane can occur in the Maldives, and bad weather doesn’t last long.”
Low Moisture Accumulation – “The atmosphere is not able to accumulate amounts of energy so the bad weather episodes cannot last weeks as in other parts of the world.”
Highly Localisation – “If it is raining on our island, chances are that the sun shines brightly on a island located two sand banks south
National Geologic Map day is just the time to share one of my new favourite sites. – Dark Sky. I’m a lover of visual representation of data (bit of an Edward Tufte groupie). Dark Sky brings together two of my favourite tools – maps and interactivity. To help share updates on everyone’s favourite topic (and often top reason for going to the Maldives) – the weather. In fact, all of my interactive graphical features on Maldives Complete are map based – Snorkel Spotter, British Admiralty Maps DeepZoom (needs IE unfortunately), and Dive Maps. The Dark Sky site is very high quality and aesthetically well done with lots of weather data.
In honour of Geologic Map Day, I have added the “Maps” tag to the blog.
When (and where) to see Whale Sharks and Mantas are right up there in the Top 10 List of Frequently Asked Questions about the Maldives. A number of answers abound on the web especially in the TripAdvisor Maldives Forum, but none so illustrative as Moosa Fulhu’s 3 slides posted on the “Marine Biology in the Maldives” Facebook page.
May all your seasons bring tidings of majestic pelagics.
One of the most frequently asked questions by prospective visitors to the Maldives is, “When/where is the best weather?” I’ve post about periodically myself. The TripAdvisor Maldives Forum has a special FAQ thread about it. But Kurumba decided to really tackle the subject in a fun and informative way on its blockbuster YouTube channel.
“High Pressure systems!… High pressure systems!…” – Brick Tamland, “Anchorman”
I remember a story from my junior high geography class where the captain of a cruise liner was being harassed by an obnoxious passenger who insisted on being shown the Equator when they crossed it. So when the ship was approaching the 0 degrees mark, the captain called the passenger up the bridge. The passenger was upset because “on the maps, it is clearly a line across the ocean”. So the quick thinking captain, pulled a long hair from his head, stretched it across the lens of his looking glass and said, “Here have a look…” The passenger saw the thin line of the hair superimposed on the vast expanse of blue and was duly satisfied that he had now seen the Equator.
And if you want the most equatorial adventure that the Maldives has to offer, then you need to go to Ayada. As the southernmost resort in the Gaafu Dhaalu atoll (the resort atoll closest to the Equator) it is your closest opportunity to crossing hemispheres.
This equator-centric location also bodes well for the Maldives weather. While “tropical” storms tend to start near the equator (with its sunny warm heating the ocean and the air), they rarely end up there. Once they gather a bit of power, then they veer north or south away from the Equator (as the picture below describes) – and away from the Maldives!
The second most frequently asked question about the Maldives is “When is the best time to go?” And this question is basically asking “When is the weather the best?” Not a surprising FAQ since one of the top draws to the destination is its tropical sunshine. The tourist board’s promotional slogan is “The Sunny Side of Life”. So if this is the allure, people are always wanting to do everything they can to optimise every ounce of sunshine during their stay.
The creator is a kindred spirit of Internet sharing. This remarkable resource provides a colourful and comprehensive interactive resource and is completely non-commercial. Ivo developed and maintained it as an outlet for his passion and his technical prowess.
It is such a useful resource that I have exploited his “embed” capability and added it to the bottom of the Maldives Complete home page.
May the winds of the Maldives always blow gently in your favour.
Today’s Spring Solstice is a traditional turning point to the seasons marking the shift to warmer days in the Northern Hemisphere. In the equatorial Maldives, seasonal shifts are marked more by the change of prevailing winds (especially since the angle of inclination doesn’t change much by definition at that latitude). These shifts typically happen in May and October. But, like this persistent UK winter which is bring us snow well into April it seems, ‘your mileage may vary’.
One of my earliest and most frequented posts is ‘Air and Water Temperature’ which provides a month by month guide of key weather indicators (eg. inches of rainfall, hours of sunshine, air temperature, water temperature). But with the weather such a central part of the Maldives draw (“The Sunny Side of Life” tagline), prospective visitors get even more meticulous in their climatic research. While island by island stats are not available (some people do ask how the weather differs on one island compared to another one a few miles away), there are some web resources which can provide a bit more detail.
Thanks to some diligent work by TripAdvisor contributor Maria Eugene, you can get precipitation stats by month for the North, Central and South regions of the Maldives. The biggest difference is looking at the ‘rainy’ seasons (the periods when the prevailing winds shift) which peak around June and November. The designation of ‘rainy’ season is purely relative as I have often explained. We have visited the Maldives in the peak of the ‘rainy’ season and still experienced more sunshine than we would see in an entire English summer (yes, faint praise I know). The key regional variations seem to be around these ‘spikes’ and the father north you get, the more statistical rainfall one seems to get (about 580mm in November at north compared to 400mm in south). Again, these are just averages and statistics and your mileage is likely to vary. Remember the gods of weather are mercurial croupiers with perverse and volatile senses of humour.
As we transferred to the Male airport for our departure, the Maldives hit us with everything it had left in its rain/wind/storm system as a final inclement send off. While it certainly made saying good-bye easier, we reflected (as noted in my ‘Stormy Weather’ post) how little it had ruined the vacation.
We had just about come to terms with these plusses and minuses until our final day when we woke up to what seemed to be National Monsoon Day. Scores of splashy downpours paraded by one after the other each one trying to outdo the previous one. The umbrella was pretty useless because the rain hit the ground so hard that it bounced up and attacked you from underneath. Still, when the weather broke a little we still went out for a family snorkel. The weather acted up a bit and it was a bit funny snorkelling in a monsoon but ‘under the sea’ everything was calm and we saw this giant stingray digging for food in the lagoon.
I think there were several keys to enjoying the holiday despite such a string of bad weather days (which all the veterans noted was uncharacteristically poor…statistically November is the 6th driest month) which are hints for the many travellers I meet who fret about the sunshine…
Enjoy each other’s company – The trip for us was a long overdue family get together and being together, playing board games, joking around, was half the fun that the weather didn’t touch. I think if your fellow travellers were not your favourite people, the time in the confined space would be a bit less fun.
Not sunbathers – Many people do come to the tropics for lounging in the sun and working on that tan. If that is a key objective to the holiday, then there is not much solace to be had in missing sun (no pun intended…oh well, maybe a bit).
Undaunted – Many would have hunkered down with even just the regular threat of wind and rain, but we boldly went out on activities like snorkelling and visiting Male and they all worked out fine if not as spectacular as a sun-drenched day would have been.
Upbeat Attitude – Every one was pretty upbeat constantly. Appreciating the many upsides and savouring the delightful experiences and striking beauty that takes more than a little rain to dissolve.
The forecast early in the week was right and we had rain every day. While the rain came down in torrents, it only lasted 20 minutes or so. The downer was not the rain but the clouds. As stated previously, the lack of sun seemed to mute the Maldives experience and take away its sparkle. It was a lovely holiday, but not idyllic. It had its silver linings (easier reading, more mild temperatures), but more downsides (no sunbathing, less dazzling, less visibility and warmth snorkelling). It just goes to show you that even in ugly weather, the Maldives is beautiful. The major impact of unkind weather is that instead of the Maldives being ‘wow’, they were only ‘wonderful’, instead of being ‘exhilarating’, they are only ‘excellent’.
