If you’ve been in Waimea this summer wondering why it feels wetter than the “dry season” you keep hearing about on the news, you’re not imagining things. The disconnect comes down to where the weather forecasters are standing when they say it.

“Dry season” and “wet season” are useful shorthand, but they’re really describing Honolulu and the resort coasts — Waikiki, Kona, Kohala. Those are leeward places, sheltered from the trade winds, and summer really is their dry stretch. But Waimea sits up in the hills between the wet Hamakua Coast and the dry Kona side, and our weather doesn’t follow the Honolulu script.

Here’s the mechanism. Hawaii’s trade winds blow out of the northeast most of the year, but they’re actually strongest and most consistent in summer — running upward of 80-90% of the time from May through October. Those winds carry moisture off the open Pacific, and when they hit the windward slopes and volcanoes, the air gets pushed up, cools, and drops that moisture as rain. Windward areas — which includes us — tend to get more clouds and more showers in summer, not fewer, because the trades that deliver the moisture are blowing harder and more often. Winter is when the trades ease up and a different pattern, Kona weather, has more of a chance to move in from the south. That’s when rain shifts to the normally-dry leeward side and Waimea gets more of its clear, cool, blue-sky stretches.

So the “dry season” label isn’t wrong, exactly — it’s just leeward-centric. If you live on the windward side of any of the main islands, summer is usually your wetter half of the year, and winter your drier one. It’s basically the reverse of what the tourist brochures tell you.

I want to be careful not to overstate this. Hawaii’s wind and rain patterns are notoriously fickle, and this general rule doesn’t hold every year or every week. We’ve had winters with unusual rain and summers that stayed surprisingly dry, and Kona weather can show up any time and flip everything on its head for a few days. If you want to actually geek out on why a particular week is behaving the way it is, Drew Davis, a meteorologist with Hawaii News Now, puts out daily forecast videos on YouTube that go into real depth on what the trade wind pattern is doing island by island — worth a follow if you like understanding the “why” and not just the “will I need an umbrella.”

But generally speaking, if you live in Waimea, you already know the rhythm: we put up with the gray skies of summer, and we live for the clear, crisp days of winter. It’s the opposite of how most of the state’s population experiences the seasons, and it’s one of those things that makes sense the minute you understand which side of the mountain you’re standing on.