Abstract
Central America exhibits a distinct seasonal cycle of rainfall, which is
objectively defined as having an onset date and a demise date of the wet
season on the first and the last day of the year when its daily rainfall
exceeds and falls below the annual mean rainfall climatology. This is
defined at the granularity of the rainfall analysis dataset.
Additionally, the methodology diagnoses the onset/demise dates of the
wet season from an ensemble of 1000 members per season by perturbing the
original timeseries to obtain robust probabilistic estimates. We show
that both onset and demise date variations have a bearing on the
seasonal length and seasonal rainfall anomaly but impact them
independently of each other. We demonstrate that a seasonal outlook
based solely on the onset date variations has useful prediction skills
that portend for real-time monitoring of the onset date of the wet
season.