Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

Tonight's storm reminded me that I haven't seen a date for the start of the rainy season. I know it's close, but...

[cheeseface]

[whoami]

I don't suppose you can have a specific date for when the rainy season starts. According to the Lonely Planet guide's charts, it depends where you are, but you should expect heavier rainfall at any time between June and September.

[tob55]

The heaviest rains in Korea generally occur between the 2nd week of July and the last week of August. The time fluctuates depending on the lunar cycles. The KWA and many other weather services generally leave the amount of precipitation during this time unmarked as the total amount of rain can commonly be more than 1200 mm in many places. They just don't have a good sense for how much rain will actually come.

As a general rule, the rainy season is the heaviest precipitation period of the year where better than 80% of the total precip for the year comes in the form of rain. This does not mean it rains non-stop. There are several "sunny" days during the rainy season, but there are also many 2 - 3 day rains that can really get things quite wet. Once the rain comes it gets hot and very sticky. This is why the schools have their vacation times set to coincide with the rain coming. Less AC costs to the schools and other related expenses. (And you thought they just wanted to give everyone a break at this time )

Anyway, I keep quite current with the weather since once upon a time I thought about meteorology as a fun degree, but have never gotten off my behind to do anything about it other than doing a lot of self learning on the subject. There are some wonderful weather sites out there that give you a better picture of the weather happenings in this part of the world. The two I commonly use are linked in this thread. They are Korean websites, but have fairly good English portals. I will post the English access links so people interested in finding out about the monsoon or rainy season can read to their hearts content.

http://w365.com/korea/eng/index_eng.html (A very good weather site. If you click on the "select a region" drop down menu, you can select any area in the country and they have a past weather link that you can see the weather records for the past 15 years for many of the locations in Korea. This will give you an idea about the months and patterns of rain during the summer.)

http://www.kma.go.kr/intro.html (Click on the English link at the top of the page)

Happy weather hunting!

[Ya-ta Boy]

Last night's rain was just regular rain. I'm not dissing it. It was nice rain with lots of good thunder and lightning, but in the end it was just regular rain.

This is the first year that I haven't heard a specific date for the start. At least one year I read a specific time of day when the rainy season would start. They only missed it by a few hours.

Typically, the rainy season in Korea starts in late June and lasts for around 6 weeks--to late July. One year we had no sun whatsoever for the entire 6 weeks. Talk about gloomy. Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle.