East African rains

[cos]

In the east African highlands, even during the rainy seasons, it's sunny and clear. You can see a great distance, like you can in Montana, and during the rainy season, you can see the rains slowly meandering across the land. After your first few, you quickly learn to estimate their path, size, and speed. Over the course of an afternoon, it might go like this...

That one's gonna miss me. Off to the left.

Ahh, this one's headed here. It'll be here in about 25 minutes and it looks like it'll last less than 10 minutes before it moves on.

Now there's a big one, looks like a half hour of rain! But it's going to pass to my right, not too far, I'll probably get some peripheral rain, but not the real downpour.

Today at lunchtime I went to the farmers' market, and picked just the wrong time. *boom* the sky opened up, and I hadn't seen it coming. I ducked inside Harvest to get some groceries there, and when I was done, pulled up the weather radar on my phone. I could see the spot of red, a small one right over Camberville, and I could see how fast it was moving, so I waited out it. About ten more minutes 'til it waned, I guessed, and I was about right.

Today's technology makes this almost as easy as East Africa. Pity it can't bring the 60s-to-80s medium humidity air here, too.

Comments

[ron_newman]

That's what the event organizers were doing at Prescott Park in Portsmouth NH yesterday afternoon. It started to pour, they looked at the weather radar, and they decided the show could continue after a short break for torrential rains.

[kirin]

So do these sites have enough public API that someone could slap together a mash-up app that performed the "look at the horizon" function and warned you (roughly of course) about half an hour ahead of any rain, predicting the intensity and duration? Of course, the accuracy would depend on the stability of of the local weather patterns. Wouldn't help to much with the kind of t-storms we get down here sometimes that pop up and die off spontaneously rather than traveling for long distances.

[hermitgeecko.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize you'd spent time in the east African highlands. When was this?

[cos]

First time, my first year and a half of life, living on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. I remember cats, the yard, a monkey, playing ball in a field near a big dam, a couple of other things, but not the rains.

Second time, during grad school, my girlfriend did a semester abroad in Kenya and I went to visit at the end of her semester for about a week and a half. Much less time spent, but lots more memories lasted.

In between, there was also growing up with lots of family photos and stories and some home movies, from our time in Uganda (my parents had already been there a few years before I was born). IIRC they even took me along on a couple of trips to Kenya when I was little, but if I have any actual memories from there, I wouldn't know how to tell them apart from Uganda memories. It's really easy to tell them apart from Israel memories.

[listgirl.livejournal.com]

One of the best things about living in the desert- watching the monsoons approach. One of the saddest- watching them pass just to the south or north or you and getting nothing but the smell of creosote.