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BRUCE ASATO / BASATO@STARADVERTISER.COM
Pedestrians make their way into the rain near Ala Moana Center with their umbrellas deployed.
After a particularly wet dry season, Hawaii has now entered a particularly dry wet season, weather forecasters said Friday.
From May through September the islands overall experienced "one of the wettest dry seasons in the last 30 years," said Kevin Kodama, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service. "It’s been a long time since we’ve been this green heading into the wet season."
But the rainy season that typically runs from October through April should be dryer than normal because of weak El Nino conditions that are expected to develop toward the end of the year.
The result should be below-average rainfall through the spring, leading to the possibility of continued drought conditions for some islands, Kodama said.
But the forecast of a drier rainy season should not be as bad as 2009 and 2010, and 1997 and 1998, when Hawaii farmers and ranchers were hit particularly hard by drought, he said.
