Storms

One of the things I like about the Mediterranean climate is the weather. Obviously, yes, it’s sunny – about 300 days a year on average. But what I almost prefer are the storms. You occasionally get a dreary drizzle like in the UK, but more often during the summer you get spectacular storms, which can appear from nowhere within an hour or two. There are bright flashes of lightening, claps of thunder and then of course the torrential rain. Today we had one of these storms – worse than usual in fact. Within minutes the street was flooding, there was a miniature mud-slide in our garden, lakes of water in our courtyard area and rivers flowing down the alley behind our house. I didn’t have much time to watch the water though, since I was soon occupied by the clean-up operation going on in the house caused by water leaking in through (closed) windows and balconies (there was so much that the guttering and drainage systems couldn’t handle it).

Two views of the clouds from the top of our garden:

I did however have time to snap this shot of the rain coming down at the back of our house:

But at least we’re still a long way off from Indian-style monsoon rain! I remember the first summer I was there, living in the Vasant Vihar area, when the monsoons arrived, watching in amazement as the water level in the streets rose to knee-depth within a quarter of an hour. I’d seen images on television and in newspapers before, but thought it was a rare occurrence – but nope, it happens every year! The next year the lowest floor of our house got flooded… The picture below (from the New York Times) isn’t from Delhi, where I was, but you get the idea…

Floods are almost a way of life in India though – there’s nothing that can be done to stop the monsoons, they just have to be dealt with. They can be incredibly severe though. Thanks to the climate in Europe, Europeans generally don’t have to deal with flooding, but it’s interesting how regular floods can impact a culture – the ancient Egyptians are a good (although somewhat extreme) example. The flooding of the Nile was an annual way of bringing new life to the country, by bringing fresh, nutrient-rich silt from the South. The amount of tax farmers paid on their land was even based on the height of the flood, with the Nilometer the instrument used to calculate the ‘flood coefficient’. The Egyptians were entirely reliant on the Nile however (the reason for me calling it an extreme example). If the flood failed one year, it was a catastrophe.

But finally, a picture showing how the ’survival of the fittest theory’ goes out the window for some species when times get desperate (National Geographic):