An interpretive ranger handed me a small rectangle of newspaper cut out from the Naples Daily News. It showed year-to-date rainfall totals for Ft Myers and nearby Naples:
Naples 37.62 inches
Ft Myers 65.29 inches
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| Can you see the mysterious rain band? Photo taken from Naples Beach in October 2011 |
The two towns are both on the same coast, only thirty minutes apart …
“Could their 2011 rain totals really be that far apart?”
Along with the piece of paper the same interpretive ranger informed me of a meteorologist from Florida International University (FIU) who months earlier had alluded to a mysterious rain band that rain across the state from Ft Myers to West Palm Beach, but did not include Naples, and thus explained the lack of rain to the south.
I track rainfall in Naples and Ft Myers using a four-gage average for both towns, and thus was curious to see if the disparity was in fact real, and not an artifact of a single station.
My numbers show the same trend, although not as far apart:
Naples 34.4 inches
Ft Myers 51.52 inches
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| Naples (blue) had a subpar wet season compared to nearby Ft Myers (red). |
As for the rain band theory …
I’m still trying to track that FIU researcher down.
