The September wind lashed the banana again in the Zona Bananera

The map is the morning of 26 September, and the banana on the ground concentrates in the north of the municipality, around Río Frío. In the strong-drop analysis the group is tighter, with a thin group to the west, at La Candelaria. For anyone who has to walk the farms, the walk starts at Río Frío: the affected zone is there.

In the mild-drop analysis of the plants, the patch opens toward El Reposo and La Isabel. Varela, south of Río Frío, enters more. From Sevilla south, through Soplador, Guamachito and Tucurinca, the map stays almost clear.

The wind of 26 September came back to the same north that already showed damage on 14 September. Part of what that morning shows was already on the ground. A plant that was knocked down does not stand up, and the bunch on that lot is already lost.

In Crop signal drop, the satellite radar sends a wave to the ground and watches how much comes back. It does not need a clear sky, and on this coast cloud is the usual sky. A standing planting is a roof of wide leaves that returns a lot. With the plants knocked down, the leaves lie against the soil and the echo comes back weaker.

The decibel measures how far that echo fell. A fall of 2.0 decibels leaves about 63% of the wave, about a third less. A fall near 1.7 is a smaller fall.

On a radio, turning the volume down by a third is a drop of 2.0 decibels, and that line leaves 335.7 hectares of banana clearly on the ground. When the leaning plant is counted too, the softer filter lets more lots through and the total is 698.8 hectares. The 335.7 hectares sit inside the 698.8 hectares, on the same map.

The strong-drop analysis counts the banana that is clearly on the ground. 14 September marks 291.2 hectares. 26 September marks 335.7 hectares. Between the two mornings there are 44.5 hectares more of banana on the ground on 26 September.

The mild-drop analysis of the plants also counts the leaning plant. 14 September marks 593.8 hectares. 26 September marks 698.8 hectares. Between the two mornings there are 105.0 hectares more on 26 September, counting the leaning plant too.

The afternoon of 26 September looks at that morning again. In the strong-drop analysis, morning and afternoon agree on 72.4 hectares of banana on the ground. In the mild-drop analysis of the plants they agree on 113.1 hectares, counting the leaning plant too. Those are the squares where the banana is down in the morning and again in the afternoon. That shared part is smaller than the whole morning.

This analysis is a single measurement: the morning of 26 September, in squares of 100 metres, on dense banana and oil palm together, inside the municipality. The guild walks the year and speaks of banana. The two counts stand together because they measure different things.

A plant that was knocked down does not stand up between one event and the next. Another part of the damage sits below this filter. What this reading puts on the map is the place and the date.

Asbama is the banana growers’ association of Magdalena and La Guajira. On 11 August 2026, in SieteDías and in Hoy Diario del Magdalena, the gusts appear as something that returns in this season, with gusts that historically exceed 30 kilometres per hour.

That report counts 1,000 to 1,500 hectares of banana in Zona Bananera, more than 250 small producers and about 700 families. José Francisco Zúñiga, executive president, asked for support to recover the municipality’s productive capacity.

On 22 September, in Portafolio, the report had already reached at least five climate events in the year, about 3,500 hectares and about 450 small producers. In that interview the loss from the exchange rate runs from 7.5 to 8 million pesos per hectare a year, and the accumulated losses are about 150,000 million pesos.

The weekend of the 26th brought the sixth wind event. On the 27th, El Colombiano published the message from Zúñiga Cotes about further damage in the crops of the municipality. On the 29th, El Espectador published the same message and placed it on that weekend. The hectare figure Asbama gave on the 22nd stays about 3,500.

On 2 October, Carlos Jaramillo Ríos, executive president of the Chamber of Commerce of Santa Marta for Magdalena, published in La República the column «Pensar en el banano, es pensar en el Magdalena». The September gusts raise the sector’s estimate above 4,000 hectares in the year. The column counts 599 farms, 549 small producers and about 12,000 jobs at risk.

It also carries Asbama’s calculation: a hectare of 2,300 boxes a year could lose about 7.8 million pesos at a rate of 3,099 pesos. In 2025, as the column states, Colombia exported more than US$1,300 million in banana. Magdalena contributed about 30% of national production, and the fruit was about 43% of the department’s exports.

The other wind record is ERA5-Land, a simulation from Copernicus. The value is the mean wind at 10 metres that the model assigns to a cell of about 9 kilometres, averaged over that hour. In that series September looks normal.

The damage is done by gusts, and they last a few seconds. A calm hourly mean says the gust does not fit in that datum. The mark on the crop is the evidence that remained of that wind.

The satellite radar splits the map into squares of 100 metres, one hectare each. A square enters when at least half was already dense crop, fixed from 1 March to the middle of May by its dense green and by the closed canopy seen before.

Each pass subtracts the median fall of those squares that day. A rainy day lowers the echo across the whole municipality at once. What stays marked is the lot that fell further than its neighbours that same day.

Each morning is read against the three previous mornings of the same pass. The morning of 26 September is set beside the earlier morning of that pass in the month, the 14th.

The strong-drop analysis uses 2.0 decibels in the morning and in the afternoon. The mild-drop analysis of the plants uses 1.67 in the morning and 1.76 in the afternoon. The afternoon is the other look on the same day. Those lines are Zona Bananera’s lines in this reading.

The morning of 26 September marks 335.7 hectares of banana clearly on the ground, inside 698.8 hectares that also count the leaning plant, on the dense crop of Zona Bananera. That banana on the ground concentrates in the north, around Río Frío.