March this year wetter than usual

Welcome to April, the month when the temperature really begins to soar in Doha. A few hardy souls may have managed to make it to the end of March without using their air conditioning units yet, but I bet that not many people will be able to say that by the end of this month.
Exactly what weather April will bring to Qatar, we cannot be sure, but if March is anything to go by, it may be fairly unexpected! The weather last month was a bit strange in Qatar. It’s usually my favourite month, with mild weather that is ideal for outdoor dining and trips to the park. However, this year a number of those outdoor activities had to be postponed due to what is usually a rare sight in Doha, namely rain.
This March was wetter than usual. Remember the storms of March 9? They brought heavy rain to Doha, but also battered the United Arab Emirates with winds of up to 126 kilometres per hour and as much as 294 millimetres (nearly 12 inches) of rain. However, March’s rain didn’t just fall on one day, and we saw far more rainy days than we do in most years. At the time of writing this, on March 30, rain had been spotted falling from the skies above Doha on 11 different days of the month and more rain is forecast over the next few days. If the forecast is right (and when have forecasters ever been known to be wrong?) then we can expect that number to rise to 12. That means, on average, rain has fallen more than once every three days in March, which isn’t bad for a desert.
Not only was this March greyer than usual, it was also less hot. This will probably have been helped by the rain, cooling down the air, but it has been quite noticeable. The temperature in Doha has only risen above 30C three times this month, a far cry from the March heat that we baked in just three years ago, when temperatures soared to over 30C on ten different days.
Our wet, cool month has mercifully spared us from an onslaught of dust storms. Dust storms can be particularly relentless at this time of year. In March 2012, dust reduced the visibility to 3 kilometres or lower on ten different days. This year it was a much more manageable four days. I, for one, am very happy about this; I’d gladly take rain over a dust storm any day of the week.
Now we are in April, don’t assume that the rain has finished with us just yet. We usually see a good few days of rain in April and it can last for almost a week. Last year was an exception, because the rains were a little late and arrived at the beginning of May. Every year when it rains in April, people tell me that it never rains this late in the spring. I guess that just goes to show that people have short memories and the long, hot summers seem longer than they really are.
Whether we see rain this April or not, one thing is a near certainty, and that is that the weather is going to get increasingly hot over the coming weeks. The average temperature in April is 31.9C, but in May that soars to a sticky 38.2C. Phew!
At least the weather at this time of year isn’t usually too humid. Dry air is always easier to cope with than humid air, because our bodies find it easier to regulate their temperature. Our bodies attempt to stay cool by sweating, or in the case of a lady, by glowing! As the sweat evaporates from your skin, it turns from liquid to gas, and this takes a lot of energy. The energy needed for this is taken from our bodies, using the heat from our skin. Therefore as the sweat evaporates, we feel cooler. Sweating is less efficient if there is already a lot of moisture in the air, because the sweat will evaporate slower. This means there is a greater chance of overheating and heat exhaustion in humid weather.
Fortunately, in Qatar the prevailing wind is from the northwest. This brings us air which has travelled across the deserts of Iraq, then down the Gulf. The air does pick up a little moisture from the waters of the Gulf, but it’s still very dry when it reaches Qatar. It’s only when the wind swings round and comes in from the east that things in Doha get sticky. It is this easterly wind that brings in the humid air which will make your sunglasses instantly steam-up when you step outside, or when condensation forms on the outside of your window.
The humidity doesn’t normally kick in until July. So although it will get much hotter in the coming weeks, hopefully it will be a few more months before the humidity arrives.