People interested in weather tend to be number people; I am one myself. So I am going to bring you some stats from time to time. Right now we are experiencing some hot weather, but today I see some big clouds in the morning and yesterday my taxi driver said he smelled rain on the way. Based on the wonderful dataset of weather from 60 years at Don Muang -- some 22000 days of records -- the annual march of heat and rain are shown on the chart. We see that maximum daily temps have a ceiling of about 40 deg C (we had a 39 last week). This is 104 deg F. But after mid May we see high temps are increasingly rare. Meanwhile rains enough for local flooding can occur as early as March but are most likely in May or June. The rains put an end to the high temps. To my surprise the rains in April through June are statistically more likely to be larger than the rains later in the season, beginning in September.
This year I have found the outdoor heat to be particularly overwhelming, even though it is not statistically exceptional. A matter of age?
In days past when I lived in Isan some fifty years ago, Songkran was followed by weeks of sultry heat -- more severe than Bangkok -- when people often slept away the afternoons beneath their houses. The land was dry and cracked, the air smoking with burned rice stalks, and everyone stored up energy for the rains which turned the rice paddies to soft black mud which allowed for ploughing and planting.
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