I was fortunate enough to visit Hawaii once, and I remember going to Honolulu and sitting on the beach at Waikiki. It was nice, but to enjoy a true tropical island experience, it's best to go to one of the more isolated Hawaiian Islands or to an out-of-the-way piece of real estate in the South Pacific or the Caribbean Sea, for example.

Once you've reached your long-awaited destination, you can explore the sandy beaches and turquoise lagoons, perhaps see frigatebirds and red-footed boobies flying overhead and parrot fish lounging in the shallow waters offshore, and then admire a stunning sunset. Later on, when the deepening shadows turn day into night, the stars will be more brilliant than you've ever seen them. I'm on my way!

Although this sounds idyllic, like a lot of things, the anticipation of vacationing in a place where the Sun is shining, palm trees are swaying, and waves are lapping at your feet, turns out to be better than the actual experience. When you get to the tropical paradise you've been day-dreaming about for months, you may discover things like nasty bugs, food that doesn't agree with you, constant winds, and persistent clouds. You may also have to deal with rain, sometimes tropical deluges. On Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific, just north of the Equator, the average rainfall is nearly 175 inches a year!

In addition, on seasonal to annual time scales, El Nino and La Nina phenomena are strongly felt in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Moreover, a phenomena known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) sometimes affects the tropical western Pacific and Indian Oceans on month-to-month time scales. The MJO reverses normal patterns of winds, sea surface temperature, cloudiness, and rainfall. Furthermore, if the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the belt of clouds and rain the girdles the Earth near the Equator, happens to overlie your vacation spot, it would likely make your stay a tad on the gloomy side. And of course, you can't forget about hurricanes or typhoons. So, it's good to do a little homework before you throw down a hefty deposit for a nice bungalow on Tahiti, for instance, and then realize that you've picked a time when the weather for your vacation will be more typical of Toledo than Tahiti.

One thing that you may not have to deal with on a tropical isle is afternoon and evening thunderstorms. At mainland beach resorts, quite often the afternoon boomers will send you packing. On continents and large island such as Madagascar, during the warmer times of the year, the build up of heat during the day frequently leads to the formation of cumulus clouds and convective thunderstorms. Cumulus congestus clouds will blossom with the help of a little vertical air movement, such as from a steady sea breeze, and if enough heat and water vapor are sucked upward, cumulonimbus clouds will darken the sky. In south Florida, for example, thunderstorms occur nearly every afternoon during the summer season, generally forming during the hottest part of the day. Intense downpours may last from a few minutes to several hours.

In the oceanic tropics, however, convection isn't as strong as on the mainland, especially within the zone of trade winds, since the lower troposphere doesn't undergo significant diurnal variations in temperature. Therefore, there's not the same predisposition for afternoon thunderstorms as there is on large land masses. In fact, in contrast to mainland areas, on many tropical islands, the lowest average hourly rain rates occurs in the late afternoon and evening. It should be noted, though, that if large mountains dominate an island's geography, they can extract huge amounts of moisture from ocean air. As the warm, vapor-laden air rises up windward slopes, the moisture is wrung-out as it cools and condenses. When this is the case, afternoon rains can be more commonplace.

In the tropics, the nights are always long since just as the Sun is high in the sky during the day, it's a long way from the horizon at night. If you're on an island near the Equator, the position of the Sun in the sky at noon varies only 23 1/2 degrees from the zenith (directly overhead) between winter and summer. However, at a place half way between the North Pole and the Equator, the Sun position at noon in late December is only 21.5 degrees above the southern horizon, but in late June, it's 68.5 degrees above the horizon. There's only a little more than 8 hours of daylight at 45 degrees north latitude in late December, but 6 months later, the daylight has almost doubled. At the Equator, though, there's about 12 hours of daylight in mid December and in mid June as well.

During the long tropical nights, the temperature gradually cools, and frequently, by the early morning hours the water vapor in the air has condensed, producing showers. It often rains between about 4 and 7 am, just when it should, when most everyone is sound asleep.