In OGD V9 #342, Oliver said: "Asia fits neatly with high Northern latitudes, in that the monsoon is also the hot, long day period and a calendar match to Summer"
Hmmmm. Obviously, no-one has told our local weather Gods about this. Right now the days are getting shorter (our longest day was Sept 23rd) but we are still stuck in the usual October-November stinking hot fug. Things usually cool down abruptly sometime around late-November to early December, when the North-East monsoon arrives. It is gloriously wet and cool as we swing through December 22nd, one of our two shortest days (wot, you guys only get one ???? You're being shortchanged .... complain to your local MP), and if this is a particularly wet year, we won't get the hot & sweaty back until a couple of weeks before our longest day on March 20th. (Wot, you also get only one longest day per year ???? Ridiculous. Go sue someone). If you think this is weird, try travelling very slowly up the coast of Vietnam from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi. Or worse, try island-hopping around the Philippines. Both these places have incredibly complex climatic/rainfall patterns ... you can be mid-monsoon in one place, but mid dry-season 50 kilometers away. One location can have a monsoon during the hot season, but 50 km away the monsoon comes during the cool. I'm sure Oliver will point out that in Singapore we don't have any native species that are deciduous during the dry season, and he'd be almost right .... we actually do have one. But my point is that it is really tricky trying to predict the correct dry-period rest times from gross climatic data. For example, Calanthe vestitia is a widespread deciduous species that drops it's leaves and flowers at the start of the dry season, then rests until the rains arrive again. It occurs on the Thai isthmus (as well as elsewhere). On the west side of the isthmus, it flowers with the start of the dry season in October-November, and puts out new shoots in March-April. On the east side of the isthmus, it flowers with the start of the dry season in May-June, and puts out new shoots in September-October. If you were to import a specimen from Thailand, you'd need to know exactly where it came from if you wanted to duplicate it's native climatic cycle. Peter O'Byrne In hot and sweaty Singapore ... still part of Asia, last time I looked. _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
