Early last week I was thinking about the start of fall, the coming of winter, and how I would have to put away my rain gauge once the weather turned cold. I realized that throughout the spring and summer, there was only one day we had gotten more than an inch of rain, and that was in the spring, just a few days after I installed the rain gauge.
Perhaps I was sensing the future, because by the end of last week we'd had three days with more than an inch of rain! The grand total for my rain gauge last week was 6 inches. Other CoCoRaHS observers in the county reported even more, so it's no surprise there was a lot of flooding in some areas.
There are 2 other rain-gauge-related notes I've been meaning to share:
Death in Paradise
A few years ago, while visiting Wendy's family, Bill watched an episode of a TV show called Death in Paradise. It's about a British detective solving murders on an island in the Caribbean. Wendy and I had never seen it before, but it looked good, so we started watching the show whenever it aired. Recently, Wendy was watching an episode in which a meteorologist was murdered while taking measurements at a weather station. She got excited and called me in to show me this scene:
On the left you can see a rain gauge exactly like the one I have! It's got a funnel at the top, a narrow inner tube and a large outer tube. I would guess there's about a half-inch of rain in it. It's a bummer for the meteorologist that he had to be murdered, but at least his killer was brought to justice in the end.
Powered Paragliding
A month or so ago I went outside in the morning to check my rain gauge. I heard a strange-sounding plane, but I didn't pay much attention to it at first. It got louder, though, so I looked up in the sky to see what it was. Eventually, I saw it, and it wasn't a plane. It was a guy sitting in a chair, attached to a parachute, with a big fan on the back of the chair, propelling him forward.
Huh, I thought. That's weird.
And indeed it was. I didn't think to take a picture, but I'm not sure it would have turned out well anyway. I searched the web for a description of what I saw, and I found it: powered paragliding. Here's a picture of what it looks like:
That's not an everyday sight, at least not in our neighborhood!