The Wet Season in Dakar Begins with a Bang!!

This morning I woke up and felt uncomfortable. In my journal I wrote "The Monsoon is coming!" This comes after deploying our dense and coarse rain gauge network last Mon-Wednesday. While we pulled up to one village, the Chief greeted us and told us just in time. The rain is coming soon. While I couldn't have known how he came to the conclusion, it felt like he was right.

This morning we were driving to our village of Kawsara because we have some work to finish at the solar array and also discussing how to use renewable energy to help them pump water from approximately 190 ft. Kawsara is the village, where we undertook our field campaign in 2006 with NASA. However, they began digging for water in 2004 and found water in October of 2010. The renewable center at Chiekh Anta Diop University has been working on ideas to help them pump the water to the surface so that maybe they can begin some irrigation to grow food.


So we left for Kawsara about 8:45 this morning. On the way the sky began to look very Dark. I told my colleague, the monsoon is coming. I look again and said hey that is not rain, that is brown it looks like dust. 60 seconds later -- lights out. Day became night and everyone put their lights on. Dust was everywhere and the wind was howling. 4 minutes later rain began to fall heavily -- Yeah the Monsoon and wet season arrived. So exciting for us science geeks!!

So a couple of things with the monsoon. We have been planning to measure ozone prior to the wet season arriving because we believe that the soils have bacteria which will release nitric oxide (NO) because they are water stressed from the long dry season of 6 months. This in turn should make ozone (O3) levels high. We have seen this signal over the last few years but this year we are coordinate with scientists from the ministry of environment to monitor the surface levels. Well in short, our boxes arrived too late for our first ozone measurements. We will launch the first one on Monday so we don't have a reference prior to the first rains. But that is the way it goes.

Second, the rains were so heavy and there was some minor flooding on the roads. The drainage is too bad in the suburbs of Dakar. We cannot predict what is coming but the seasonal forecast is pointing to above normal rain. With the lack of electricity in Dakar, poor drainage and heavy rains forecast this year ... watch out. Mosquitoes gonna be biting and Malaria outbreaks need monitored.