Now considering solar declination alone the 29th of April should be the hottest day of the year in Bangkok, latitude 13.9, for that is the day when the sun passes directly overhead and there is no shadow at noon. But saturday there were no shadows at noon, and in fact the past few days have been downright cold. When I stopped by Jack and Dah's place after a thunderstorm several of the tall willowy trees that have sprung up in their garden had bent all the way over so the crowns of the trees were splayed out in the garden. Evidently the wind had got the water-soaked tree swinging back and forth until it reached a point of instability and collapsed, though Jack told me later that he was able to put them right again without permanent damage.
Young willowy trees, as unstable as young men.
Now when I first came to Thailand I thought the hot season was going to be a relentlessly increasing tide of heat peaking in April and agian in September. But this is not how things have behaved at all the past few weeks, and if you look at the march of temperature and wind as we do here you get a picture that looks a little like those trees in Jack's yard. "Normal" hot weather (orange zones) with steady breeze from the south, punctuated by unstable wind directions accompanied by storms and cool weather.
Cold strokes in the hot season or the other way around?
I don't know anything about meteorology, low pressures and the South China Sea, but the behavior of the wind and the level of comfort looks more like the stock market or my girlfriend's moods than some orderly sun-driven cosine thing.
I guess I'm going to have to start reading a little Mandelbrot if I'm ever going to survive in this place.
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