Missed us

Hurricane Ike, taken September 10 from the International Space Station. Photo by NASA

Missed us!

Hurricane Ike devastated Cuba and some other western Caribbean islands, but as with almost all Atlantic tropical storms, it missed Panama.

One of the selling points for Panama on the many of real estate hype websites is that we don't get hurricanes here. That's mostly true, but the Atlantic side every now and then does get sideswiped by large tropical storm systems.

However, the Earth's climate is changing and the scientific models are not sophisticated enough to predict all the changes with any certainty. We do know that there are more and stronger tropical storm systems, and so far they have kept more or less to the same tracks that they have in the past. We do know that these phenomena form and gain strength over the sea and move roughly from the ocean between Africa and South America and move generally north-northwest, such that Panama's flank is partially protected by the South American land mass.

In fact, Panama is just close enough to the storm tracks that when a large system like Ike sweeps by us, it tends to incorporate our rain clouds into its fury, leaving Panama with some sunny days to punctuate our rainy season.

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Missed us

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