Seasonal Musings

This weekend marks the unofficial beginning of Summer, 2007, which coincides with the end of Spring, 2007. Because of that, I'm going to pose my weather question.

I think I've already said that I have questions about the "inches of mercury" used to measure barometric pressure, ones that my personal assistant could answer for me if I'm ever lucky enough to have one. Another thing my assistant could figure out is why we measure rainfall in inches.

Not that we've had very much at all this year where I live. The word dry comes to mind, unless we're talking about my yard, in which case the better word would be brown. Still, the little rain we've gotten, as well as the seasonal norm, is always given as a matter of inches.

It goes without saying that when we receive rain every container in the yard fills up with about three times the amount the officials say we got. I suppose I could get around that and get a result more in line with the proper number if I had a tube about a foot tall with a one inch opening, but I don't. As it is, the buckets and coffee cans out there all give me a wildly inflated figure and get me excited about just how much rain we've gotten.

But that doesn't have much to do, at all, with my question.

Water, and by extension, rain, is a liquid last time I looked. I guess counting up the inches that have fallen is a measure of volume, but doesn't water already have a built-in measure of that? Don't we, for every thing other than rain or snow, measure volume in cups or quarts or shots? If we want to be scientific or European, we could use liters or ccs, and I think any of them would be a better way to measure rainfall than the way we do now. Inches, to me, measure length.

Liters of rain per square meter, or cups per square yard, would be a sensible way to measure rainfall, and I guess that's why we don't do it. One of the first things my personal assistant would be charged with is starting the march to get everyone on board with adopting the Russell Standard for Precipitation Measurement.

Unless, of course, someone else has come up with this idea already.