I’m not talking about opening the gates to the waters beyond or anything Biblical like that, but what effect would it have on an area if it were to rain, non-stop, for 40 days?
Let’s lay out some basic assumptions to our little exercise…
*Rate of rain, not torrential but heavy enough that you wouldn’t want to get out into it unless you had to. So what is that about .25 inch an hour?
*Full-blown cloud cover.
*Season - summer.
That’s six inches of rain a day. What would that do to plants like grasses, trees? Would the plants die like an over-watered house plant?
And if the plants died, would there be a ripple effect that traveled up the food chain from grazers to predators to scavengers?
What about aquatic ecosystems, would they the choked to death by the contant flow of silt?
Would hillsides just turn into mudslides everywhere under the wieght of the water?
How would human abodes stand up to that much constant water? Would roofs begin to fail just from the constant dampness, would mildew be growing everywhere in the house?
Would we all get some sort of respritory disease?
Project out, what about 400 days, 4 years?
Why do I ask? Just fiddling with the controls on my 1920’s weather ray.
4 inches of rain a day is a whole lot of water. The Seattle area suffers flooding by rivers and such after receiving only an inch of rain in a 24 hour period. One inch of rain in a day is a fairly steady rain all day and night too. Last spring this area had a stretch of 33 consecutive days with measurable rainfall, by the end everything was saturated and small amounts of rain were cause street flooding. The area had some major mudslides and river levys failed. If what you described were to happen, I could see some pretty catastrophic results.
About three years ago we had one day without rain during the summer, over a period of about 45 days. We had high water in all low areas. Mildew on almost everything. The white aluminum siding was black and had to be power washed clean. The soil loses much of it’s nutrients, the plants yellow, the roots rot, and the soil bateria becomes anaerobic instead of aerobic. The best discription I have read to match my experience was about India and it’s monsoon season. Hot, humid, leather rots, everything molders, and the bitting insects thrive.
We had it last year here in Honolulu. I like rain but when sewer systems are about to start backing up, when reservoirs begin to burst and you get floods in Honolulu proper things have gone too far.
I still just love the sound and smell of rain though. Comes from growing up above Hilo.
Feb 19 to April 2. The measurements here would have come from the airport which is leeward of the mountains. If you lived in Manoa or Kailua you’d have gotten a lot more. I do believe those last 2 days of March were when the flooding occured and the finally had to resort to raw sewage into the Ala Wai to keep the toilets in Waikiki from backing up. Then they had to close the beaches due to high bacteria counts. Lovely huh? They’re still working to make sure it never happens again which includes a large above ground sewer pipe along a third of the Ala Wai Blvd. sidewalk so I can’t go walking. It’s been there for over half a year! Grrrr.
Southern California would wash into the Pacific. That much rain would trigger mudslides wherever the slope is greater than 30%. Malibu would wash away, PCH would be closed for months, the Santa Anna river would wash away half of Orange County.
If it rained continually for that long, I’d be effing pissed. My hair + rain = ugly frizzy mess. I’d lock up in the house and only go out when I had to, provided it didn’t flood first.
I’ve been thinking and thinking about this, rainy, from a hydrologist’s perspective.
The problem is that normal rainfall events tend to follow a curve, not a straight line “one quarter inch per hour for 40 days”.
There are so many variables to think about … in a big watershed, 0.25 inches per hour would not be a biggie … OTOH in a small watershed it would be devastating.
I could tell you a lot about rainfall/runoff relationships, or about riverine flooding, if you wanted to know.
Once got into a “flood never happened” argument with a creationist in another chat room.
I meantioned that if the world became as flooded as the bible describes, then salt water fish would die form not enough salt in water, while fresh water fish would perish for the opposite reason.
He replied by claiming that Noah’s ark carried two of every species, and after the water level returned, all would be well…
I left him there to figure out his own logical mis-step…
