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Abstract We introduce a simple method to define the start and the end of the rainiest part of the year as the first and the last day of the year when the daily rain rate is more or less than the annual mean climatological rain rate for a region or at a given grid point of the rainfall analysis, respectively. A novelty of this work is the adoption of a perturbation technique to generate a total of 1001 ensemble members to account for observational and analysis uncertainties. This allows for a probabilistic estimate of the start and retreat dates of the rainy season at the granularity of the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG), version 6, rainfall analysis over Central America. The seasonal cycle of the IMERG rainfall analysis is also found to verify with in situ observations in the region. Many large-scale climate drivers affect regional rainfall, often with complex interactions that affect the onset date, retreat date, and magnitude of the seasonal rainfall cycle, making it difficult to predict the length or total quantity of seasonal rainfall using climate drivers alone. Once an onset date is established, however, this metric alone can be more indicative of both the length and total seasonal rainfall anomaly than predicting how the climate drivers will interact to affect the quantity and duration of upcoming seasonal rainfall. The local relationships of the start date with seasonal length and rainfall anomaly are leveraged to produce effective seasonal outlooks of the rainy season for the region by just monitoring the start date variations. Significance Statement The start date and retreat date of the rainy season in Central America are defined every year, precisely to a specific date from our proposed definition of it. This is possible because the region exhibits a strong seasonality of the rainfall. As a result, the year-to-year (interannual) variation of the seasonal rainfall during the rainy season is also determined by the variations in the length of the season that are usually overlooked in fixed calendar seasons. We define the start or retreat date of the rainy season as the first or the last day of the year when the daily rain rate exceeds or falls below the average daily rainfall from 2001 to 2022, respectively. We also find that both start and retreat date variations independently influence the length and total seasonal rainfall of the rainy season. Consequently, these relationships are leveraged to provide an outlook of the forthcoming rainy season from the diagnosis of the variations of its onset date, which is shown to be an effective predictor with significant useful seasonal prediction skills.
Rodgers et al. (Wed,) studied this question.