Calibrating Rain

Published November 17, 2020

I’ve always been fascinated by the rain.

I attribute this to California not having much rain, in general. Despite growing up in semi-arid conditions with lots of landscape watering, I enjoy seeing green things and water.

Minnesota when it isn’t snowing, has lots of rain. Often when it rains, it’s very hard rain. Rain I hardly ever see in California.

So when visiting California recently, and it was “raining”, I thought about comparing the volume of rain coming down in a way that makes more sense than “number of inches this season”.

One time I was out watching the rain in Minnesota and I was standing under the roof eaves to stay dry. Then the wind changed so I made a dash for the front door of the house. That day in Minnesota it was raining so hard that within 5 seconds I was soaked to the skin.

By comparison, the rain I was looking at just now in California is a reasonable California light rain. I believe it would take a considerably longer time of standing in that rain to get fully soaked to the skin. Maybe 10 minutes? Maybe 30? I didn’t want to experiment.

I like the more varied weather.

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