Steven Patton

My name is Steven Patton, and I'm in charge of the physical monitoring program for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Our data goes back to 1880 when the French first arrived to start doing their construction. One of the first things they did was to install climate stations because they knew that rainfall was going to be an incredibly important thing.

Imagine right now the water is only about two feet below the level of the dock. It was something like 10, 12 feet. We had to go down a ladder to get on the boat.

Whenever you see a really impactful phenomenon, there's the scientist side saying, wow, that's really fascinating. But then the other human side says, ooh, that's really bad.

So we don't know whether this is just an outlier, that it was just random. We just threw three double sixes in a row, or whether it represents the canary in the coal mine.