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November 30, 2007
Digression: Explaining Rain to Southern Californians
After not having had real rain in more than eight months, and having had a year with less than half as much rain as usual, today's bucketing rain here in San Diego is causing some entertaining behaviors, as well as traffic frustrations.
Here, for example, is the National Weather Service forecast re-explaining to readers the difference between heavy, moderate, and light rain:
THE RAIN IS HERE. MOST OF THE SHOWERS IN THIS MOIST SOUTHERLY FLOW ARE LIGHT...BUT THERE ARE A FEW MODERATE SHOWERS. THEY MAY SEEM HEAVY TO US WHO HAVE NOT SEEN REAL HEAVY RAIN IN A LONG TIME.
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Hilarious. I went to a conference in San Diego about ten years ago. It happened to coincide with a hurricane (or typhoon, in Pacific-ese) which was expected to brush the coastline. I'm from Florida, and by our standards most of the "rain" barely qualified as a light afternoon fog.
In all seriousness, it was what we call "misting"... you'd run the wipers on intermittent and ignore it. It didn't even warrant an umbrella. There were some high, white, wispy clouds for a few days -- and the city was gripped with terror.
I remember bombing down the fast lane at 80 in my rental car, passing endless lines of terrified Californians creeping along at 35 MPH -- and actually having accidents with each other. The DJs on the radio station were crowing about how it's "raining cats and dogs" and something about "40 days and nights of rain"... and the whole time I think it actually managed to produce some real, solid rain for maybe two hours.
Admittedly, in SoCal this is enough to produce flash floods, and to pump vast amounts of heinous filth out of the Rio Grande and into the ocean, but memories of the whole episode never fail to amuse me...