Storms aren’t as exciting alone

I miss living with Laura and Darren. Also Monica was here for awhile, but she’s gone back home. And John is in California (again).

The thunder and lightening started so loudly and suddenly that the dogs started barking, even though they are used to thunder. We just didn’t expect it so loud and close by, without having heard it in the distance first.

There was no wind or rain at first. Just calm sunshine. And insane thunder. Then We saw a rainbow with the approaching rain behind it.

Then the rain came.

Then it was nuts for awhile, with the thunder sounding non-stop, and rain pouring down.

 

It was crazy-loud on the flat roof, pounding the skylights, and pouring in sheets out the canales.

My pictures don’t remotely do it justice.

That was when I was imagining that if someone else had been here, we could have exclaimed about how loud it was, how sudden it was, how intense it was. We could have talked about what it would have been like to watch it from up on the hill rather than down here at the rental.

We could have wondering how many inches per hour we were getting (or whatever measurement one uses to measure how much rain can come down in how short of a time period). Is that velocity? No, velocity would be how fast a raindrop came down.

See, if someone were here, we would wonder this together, and someone would think they knew, and someone else would google it and prove them wrong.

With streams, the velocity is the speed the water is flowing, and the volume per unit of time is called discharge rate. So what’s volume per unit of time called for rain? Would that also be a discharge rate? Darren’s our water resource engineer, maybe he would know.

Instead, I talked to the dogs, and the plants, and the house, and the rain, and to myself, like a crazy old lady.