By Anthony O. Miller
AUTUMN will kick in at the weekend, returning temperatures to normal for the season and ending the hot spell that has baked Cyprus for the last 10 days, the Weather Service said yesterday.
The mercury today will hit 38 degrees in the plains, 33 degrees along the coast and 30 degrees in the mountains, mirroring yesterday’s temperatures, the Service’s duty officer at Larnaca Airport said.
The first break in the heat wave will show up tomorrow with a “small drop” in temperatures, followed by cooler weather on Saturday and a return on Sunday to normal conditions for September, the duty officer said.
Light showers, possible in the mountains on Saturday and Sunday, might push temperatures there even lower expected, he added.
The ‘dog days’ of Summer are still with us for a couple reasons, including the fact that “September is still summer here,” Weather Service senior superintendent said.
“We get some periods of hot air from the Middle East (in September),” he said. “It’s not something unusual here.” In fact, he added, the current heat wave owes to the movement of hot air masses from Iran, Iraq and environs.
Normal for this season in the plains area is “around 31 degrees,” and from September 1-20, “the temperature was normal or below normal,” Piyiotis said.
But on September 21, the mercury started climbing and has hovered between two and five degrees above normal for the month since then, he said.
Yesterday’s high was reported at 38 degrees, the months’ top temperature and a fractional increase over Tuesday’s 37.4 degree high. “Of course,” Piyiotis said, even this is “not exceptional; we get hot spells in September.”
Apart from possible weekend sprinklings in the Troodos, Piyiotis said he did not expect any significant rainfall on the island any time soon.
Normal rainfall for September totals about 4.5 millimetres, Piyiotis said. And he noted that the downpour on September 20 left 5.5mm of water in the island’s dams — a whopping “122 per cent of normal rainfall for the whole month.”
However, “it didn’t make any difference” to water storage levels behind the island’s dams, he added.
For that reason, water rationing, about to begin a fourth year, will continue in the capital and throughout the island, Nicosia Water Board Technical Manager Panayiotis Theodolides said.
Homes and businesses in Nicosia and around the island now receive a 14-hour flow of government water on each of three days per week.
“Slightly better conditions this year have allowed the hours (of flow) to increase a little bit,” he said, so that residents can expect “having a supply of around 15 hours every 48 hours.”
“We hope for some rain,” Theodolides said, and “if the quantities increase due to rainfall, hopefully the hours (of flow) will be increased even further.”
The exception, he added, is Nicosia’s Old City, which has no water rationing at all.
One reason is that few people live in the Old City; it is mainly a business area. Another is fire safety, since huge Fire Service tanker trucks cannot thread its narrow streets. So to ensure stand pipes are full, the Old City’s pipes are kept full. Finally, pipes in the Old City carry water to areas on both sides of the Green Line.
Theodolides conceded that turning the water on and off during rationing had weakened Nicosia’s water pipe network, causing 25-30 per cent more cracks to show up than appear in a year of normal water flow. (The last such year was 1996.)
“It’s called fatigue,” he said, and it is an analogue to the metal fatigue that causes cracks in the fuselages and wings of jetliners, often ending in disaster.
The emergence of these cracks, he added, results in “more breakage of the pipes than during normal supply,” ultimately wasting water and costing Nicosia extra money to repair the leaks.
