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I have been thinking of writing something about Crete’s last winter – or preferably, the rainy season of 2010-11 – for a while now, but I got sidetracked several times… I finally found the time to gather some data and submit a comment, since for many people this year’s rainy season was quite weird. Hopefully, by now, when you are probably laying on a beach enjoying the eternal sunshine, you will still remember that there was something called a rainy season :-)
When it comes to weather, the last (and not the first) impression is usually the most important, and this rainy season was indeed a fairly cool and wet one towards its end. In the table at the end of this text, average temperatures and precipitation are shown for the Souda weather station (near Chania; National Meteorological Service) for the autumn and winter, as well as for March and April, during the last rainy season (2010-11), during the previous one (2009-10), and for the climatological average (1957-1997). One can see that March and April had average temperatures that were lower than both the previous year’s values and than the climatological average. April 2011 was also much wetter than last year’s (2010 spring was fairly dry) and significantly wetter than what is climatologically expected. The pattern continued into May, during which Cretans experienced unusually frequent rainfall (the nearby National Observatory station in Akrotiri recorded 35.2mm of rainfall in May 2011 as opposed to 13.8mm in May 2010).
But these recent events make us forget about the rest of the winter. Based on the table, it is obvious that the winter (Dec/Jan/Feb) of 2010-11 was actually a bit warmer than the climatological average – at least for Souda - and rainfall was just a bit higher than the climatological values. So, nothing special… And this winter followed a remarkably warm and dry autumn, during which off-season tourists enjoyed swimming even in early December, and farmers remained frustrated waiting for some good amount of rain to revive their cultivations.
The most remarkable fact about this winter is that it actually started with a very sudden cold and snowy “invasion”, which followed this warm autumn, and also it finished with one of these cold invasions in early March . These kinds of events are usually expected during January/February. However, nothing impressive happened during these months.
In summary, we could say that the rainy season of 2010-11 was indeed unusual, or one could even say “weird”: it started with an unusually hot/dry autumn and finished with an unusually cool/wet spring, just to balance things, one could say… But it was not in general as cold and miserable as many people may remember it for, judging by what happened towards the end.
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