This post will not only be useful for you if you plan to visit the region (which I highly recommend!!), but also to compare what the climate was in the past and try to understand what may have caused such changes.
Northern Maya Lowlands (including much of the Yucatan)
Rainfall on the Yucatan is highly seasonal (the wet season lasts from May until October), influenced by the migration of the International Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). This is essentially a band of clouds and thunderstorms that forms due to the convergence of the trade winds from both hemispheres. When it moves northward, it brings summer rains to the area under the influence of the Northeast Trade winds. The Azores-Bermuda high-pressure system also migrates northward in the same season. During the summer, the sea warms to a toasty 26˚C in the Caribbean and tropical/ sub-tropical North Atlantic, providing plenty of moisture to fuel the violent, convective thunderstorms and occasional major hurricanes that hit the region every few years.
During the winter, the ITCZ and Azores-Bermuda high pressure system migrate down south; this combined with relatively low sea-surface temperatures (SST) allow dry conditions to prevail with low winter precipitation (Brenner et al., 2001).
Southern Maya Lowlands
The climate here is generally much wetter, covering tropical and sub-tropical zones, and so a greater number lakes can be found in comparison to the north (Haug et al., 2003). These include Lake Peten Itza and Lake Punta Laguna, which I will be mentioning in the next post.
While the climate was not exactly the same a thousand years ago, the Maya still had to adapt to strong inter-annual variability of precipitation, often with a highly unpredictable onset of summer rains. Delayed summer rains had disastrous consequences to the farmers, many of whom depended on the slash-and-burn techniques, and so you can imagine what happened when there was a drought.
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