August 2025 at the Karen Mogensen Station: climate data and a spectacular timelapse of the rainy season
August 2025 turned out to be unusual for the Karen Mogensen Reserve: right in the middle of the rainy season, yet with surprisingly low rainfall. Only 177 mm were recorded, less than half of the climatological expectation.
Average temperatures remained high (26.0 °C), ranging from the coolest day on August 5 (Tmin 21.6 °C, Tmax 27.8 °C, mean 24.7 °C) to the hottest on August 31, when the maximum reached 32.7 °C and the daily mean 27.2 °C.
Rainfall was unevenly distributed: the wettest day was August 4, with 78.2 mm falling in just a few hours — an intense, abundant event that accounted for nearly half of the rainfall of the entire first decade of the month. After this, rainfall became much weaker, with only 29 mm in the third decade.
An unusually dry August for the tropics, with ecological and agroforestry implications worth monitoring.
A timelapse that tells the tropics
Alongside the data, August 2025 also gave us a spectacular record: a timelapse captured by the station’s webcam. In just a few minutes, it condenses 31 days of tropical skies: ever-changing convective clouds, fleeting sunshine, starry nights with the typical equatorial apparent motion of the stars, sudden lightning flashes cutting through the darkness, and calmer stratiform settings.
A vivid and captivating example of how the tropical rainy season blends beauty with atmospheric complexity.