The public should brace up for more rains in the coming days as the country enters the peak of the rainy season, the Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet) has forecasted.
A meteorologist at the Central Analysis and Forecast Office of the GMet, Joshua Asamoah said although the rains in some places in the southern part of the country including Accra would be normal – they could be intensive.
“We should expect more rainfall once we’re in the peak of the rainfall season but it would not be abnormal rainfall. We are not expecting anything above normal rainfall that we experience.”
“But the frequency will be higher within the forest zones in the Eastern and Ashanti Regions. Those areas will have more frequent rainfall. For us along the coast it will be occasional rainfall,” he told Ghanaian Times yesterday.
The interview was on the back of Saturday’s downpour which wreaked havoc on parts of the Greater Accra Region, leaving one person dead, others displaced and destroying properties.
Mr Asamoah said early June was the peak of the rainfall season in the country during which there are more rains in most places in the southern part of the country.
“This is our peak rainfall season. Around this time, the only difference is that when the rains start they are not really windy so you get the clouds staying for a longer time and producing rains for a longer period of time as we experience on Saturday. This comes with some higher volumes of rainfall.
“The good thing is for us in Greater Accra and for the most coastal area, apart from the Western Coast, is that we don’t get frequent rainfall so it rains once in a while so the number of rain occurrences is lower for us along the coast but the fewer times it rains they are usually quite intensive. The other areas often have rainfall but the amounts are not high,” he said.
Touching on Saturday’s rainfall, Mr Asamoah said, it was generally not heavy but moderate for the majority of the southern part of the country but the duration of the rainfall was quite long.
“So we had very high accumulation. It rained for six hours in some places. It was between 50 and 140 millimetres for Greater Accra. The high amount of rainfall was because of the duration,” he said.
In terms of intensity, Mr Asamoah said, Saturday’s rainfall was not the highest recorded in the country given that the highest was recorded in the early part of March and April during which heavy rains were recorded within a short time.
He said the uniqueness of the Saturday downpour was that it was the highest rainfall amount recorded within 24 hours in Accra, this year.
Meanwhile, the Ghana News Agency (GNA) reports that hundreds of documents, computers, and scanners at the Head Office of the Lands Commission in Accra had been destroyed by floodwaters.
According to the sources, essential land documents have also been “mixed up” as a result of the destruction caused by the flood.
Meanwhile, officials at the head office were tight-lipped over the matter.
BY JONATHAN DONKOR