Long-awaited rain arrives in Jakarta

JAKARTA (JP): The long awaited rain fell throughout Jakarta yesterday evening as forecast by the National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, an official said.

"Today's rainfall is spread evenly, but this is just the beginning of the rainy season," Sri Diharto, head of the agency, told The Jakarta Post.

The rain fell heavily at first but slowed to a drizzle after a few minutes, there were also intermittent bursts of thunder throughout the evening, he said.

The agency forecast earlier that the rainy season would start in Jakarta sometime between the second week of November and the first week of December.

"Even though this is a good beginning, we can't depend entirely on natural rain," he said.

"The cloud groups are not yet forming as well as expected," he added.

The agency had urged the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology to continue cloud seeding to help speed up the onset of the rainy season, he said.

Cloud seeding operations should be concentrated in the West Java area in a bid to help refill Jatiluhur dam, he said.

He said it would not yet rain everyday, only once every two days to three days.

The constant, heavy rain is predicted to start falling next month and would continue until March.

Yesterday's rain was accelerated by a cold surge in China which subsequently caused a drop in temperatures in that area, he said.

Earlier he said that as an archipelagic country near the equator Indonesia was prone to weather changes due to cross winds and other climatic factors.

He said that every change here depended on what happened outside Indonesia.

He said that yesterday's rain was not the first rainfall in Java because the rain had also started falling in a number of other areas recently.

But it was a sign that the rainy season had finally begun, he said.

He said that the good rain clouds would be formed when the West monsoon wind, caused by rising temperatures in Australia, arrived.

"This... takes place usually in December," he said. (04)