Rainfall Quotes

The funeral was held on a rainy Tuesday at the church where the Brendan family were members. The high school was excused for the day so the teachers and students could attend if they wished, and many did. Avivah's parents mourned their only child from the front pew, tears falling as steadily as the droplets outside, smattering faces as well as painted window panes.

After the eulogy, a song about heaven began to play over head, and as the song played, the Brendans lit a candle by the photo of their daughter, then returned to their seats. More than a few people in attendance were found dabbing at their eyes as the song came to a close. The group of mourners made their way slowly to the cemetery and laid the girl to rest, black umbrellas dotting the vivid green of the grass, grey sky bright, despite the rainfall. ~ Rebecca Harris

Changes in clouds and rainfall can overwhelm what little effect CO2-water vapour has on temperature. ~ Willie Soon

There's a passage in John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" that does a pretty good job describing California's rainfall patterns:

The water came in a 30-year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19 to 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of 12 to 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come ... ~ John Steinbeck

I listen to the rainfall,
my words wanna flow!
Droplets run down the wall,
where do they go?
Letters in the raw,
mesh together for the show! ~ Leslie Austin

She fell into his arms like the rainfall over an ocean. ~ Akshay Vasu

Some of the most intriguing new research is in the area of extreme weather events and rainfall. A recent study by German scientists published in Climatic Change projects that extreme precipitation will increase significantly in regions that are already experiencing extreme rainfall. Man-made global warming has already increased the moisture content of the air worldwide, causing bigger downpours. Each additional degree of temperature increase causes another seven percent increase in moisture in the air, and even larger downpours when storm conditions trigger heavy rains and snows. ~ Al Gore

Sea, autumnal sweetness, islands bathed in light, diaphanous cloak of delicate rainfall clothing Greece's eternal bareness. "Happy the person," I thought, "who is deemed worthy, before dying, to sail the Aegean." This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person's heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated ship sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

You're my moon, my stars, you're my sunrises and sunsets. You're the crisp mountain air, the first layer of snow, and that steady rainfall after a humid day. You're just everything. ~ Will Darbyshire

The umbrella won't stop the rain, but it will help you to get out during rainfall. As well as confidence is not going to guarantee your success, but it will give you the opportunity to achieve it. ~ Eyden I.

Listen carefully. Listen and you'll hear everything you need to know.

a nightmare is a different case entirely, it's a box of black shadows and vicious red stars, something to keep carefully closed, lest the ground below be broken in two

now it's a time like any other, long minutes, tedious seconds, nothing more than flat time moving forward, like it or not

it is impossible to stop some things, rainfall, for instance, and love at first sight, and the slow and steady path of sorrow

the cruel and desperate variety that always accompanies yearning for someone you're bound to lose

when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. there are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shine like heaven, so far above us qw can never hope to reach such heights

sometimes those who love you best are the ones who leave you behind

hearts were made for being broken. there's really no way around it if you want to be a human being.


...consider what people are capable of going through in this world and how much courage it's possible to have

when someone kisses you with everything they feel, you don't stop thinking about it fo ~ Alice Hoffman

The investigation described in the subsequent pages bears close relation to three sciences. It was approached by the author from the standpoint of astronomy and a desire to understand the variations of the sun. It was hoped that these variations could be more accurately studied by correlation with climatic phenomena. But the science of meteorology is still comparatively new and supplies us only with a few decades of records on which to base our conclusions. So botanical aid was sought in order to extend our knowledge of weather changes over hundreds and even thousands of years by making use of the dependence of the annual rings of trees in dry climates on the annual rainfall. If the relationship sought proves to be real, the rings in the trunks of trees give us not only a means of studying climatic changes through long periods of years, but perhaps also of tracing changes in solar activity during the same time. Thus astronomy, meteorology, and botany join in a study to which each contributes essential parts and from which, it is hoped, each may gain a small measure of benefit. ~ A.E. Douglass

There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second. ~ Stephen King

Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions. ~ Bill Bryson

One interesting side-effect of the fire in Ankh-Morpork concerns the inn-sewer-ants policy, which left the city through the ravaged roof of the Broken Drum, was wafted high into the discworld's atmosphere on the ensuing thermal, and came to earth several days and a few thousand miles away on an uloruaha bush in the beTrobi islands. The simple, laughing islanders subsequently worshipped it as a god, much to the amusement of their more sophisticated neighbours. Strangely enough the rainfall and harvests in the next few years were almost supernaturally abundant, and this led to a research team being despatched to the islands by the Minor Religions faculty of Unseen University. Their verdict was that it only went to show. * ~ Terry Pratchett

The garden of the soul, she says, can be watered in several manners. The first, drawing the water up from a well by use of a bucket, entails a great deal of human effort. The second way, cranking a water wheel and having the water run through an aqueduct, involves less exertion and yields more water. The third entails far less effort, for in it the water enters the garden as by an effluence from river or stream. The fourth and final way is the best of all: as by a gentle but abundant rainfall the Lord himself waters the garden and the soul does not work at all. ~ R. Thomas Ashbrook

The evidence that climate change is happening is completely unequivocal ... The later governments leave tackling climate change, the harder it will be to combat ... The variation we are seeing in temperature or rainfall is double the rate of the average. That suggests that we are going to have more droughts, we are going to have more floods, we are going to have more sea surges and we are going to have more storms. These are the sort of changes that are going to affect us in quite a short timescale ~ John Beddington

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? ~ Joseph Heller

What if life's opportunities are like rainfall, and we human beings are like houses? What if some of us have the ability to 'catch' opportunities as they fall, but others do not have the required 'infrastructure' to trap opportunities? ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall - there's less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

You can't be living always in the promise of the clouds; it must rain now. Leave the talking and live by walking ... It will yield an indelible impact! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop - for convenience, the one hundredth meridian - you have reached the West. ~ Bernard DeVoto

Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. ~ Carl Sagan

Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.

Darkness fell. Rain fell.

I never asked: What question?

And now it's too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, in the spring of 1938, on a rainy day that gave way to a break in the clouds, I lost you. You'd gone out to collect specimens for a theory you were hatching about rainfall, instinct, and butterflies. And then you were gone. We found you lying under a tree, your face splashed with mud. We knew you were free then, unbound by disappointing results. And we buried you in the cemetery where your father was buried, and his father, under the shade of the chestnut tree. Three years later, I lost Mameh. The last time I saw her she was wearing her yellow apron. She was stuffing things in a suitcase, the house was a wreck. She told me to go into the woods. She'd packed me food, and told me to wear my coat, even though it was July. "Go," she said. I was too old to listen, but like a child I listened. She told me she'd follow the next day. We chose a spot we both knew in the woods. The giant walnut tree you used to like, Tateh, because you said it had human qualities. I didn't bother to say goodbye. I chose to believe what was easier. I waited. But. She never came.
Since then I've lived with the guilt of understanding too late that she thought she would have been a burden to me. I lost Fitzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh - someone who knew someone tol ~ Nicole Krauss

Having a rough time on the trail is not the same as the irredeemable frustrations of urban life, such as being stuck in traffic or wading through a crowded store. Difficulty on the trail, like this long and rainy day, is usually reflected upon fondly. There is the soothing, rhythmic beat of rainfall, the feeling that the woods are being washed and rejuvenated, the odors of the woods awakened by moisture. There is appreciation for the most simple of things, such as a flat and dry piece of ground and something warm to eat. There is satisfaction in having endured hardship, pride in being able to do for myself in the outdoors. There is strength in knowing I can do it again tomorrow. ~ David Miller

It's hard to think of the divide where I grew up as a watershed. The creeks are dry most of the year, rainfall is undependable at best, and folks in one river system are always trying to steal water from another. ~ Faith A. Colburn

During our mortal schooling in submissiveness, we will see the visible crosses that some carry, but other crosses will go unseen. A few individuals may appear to have no trials at all, which, if it were so, would be a trial in itself. Indeed, if, as do trees, our souls had rings to measure the years of greatest personal growth, the wide rings would likely reflect the years of greatest moisture-but from tears, not rainfall. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The mind is like a floodplain. The slightest rainfall can leave it awash with old stories that seep into your newer terrors and swell them, drown you under long-forgotten feelings as your life rushes over you. ~ Barney Norris

The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps. ~ Chris Campanioni

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ~ Brad Leithauser

He knew something of sorrow, remembered joy, and devoutly hoped--as much as he consciously hoped for anything other than proper allotments of sunshine and rainfall--never again to encounter either of those two old annoyances. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Once we start deliberately messing with the climate systems, we could inadvertently shift rainfall patterns (climate models have shown that rainfall in the Amazon might be particularly vulnerable), causing collapse of ecosystems, drought, famine, and more. ~ Jeff Goodell

Complains are like the clouds that produce no rain no matter how thick they gather. Never depend on your complaint thinking they are stair cases. Drop that thing. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

You see them in the mercury
light of water, the expanding
orbs of silver where trout
breathe. You hear
them in the sleepy kiss
of rainfall on pine
needles, smell them
as if they were snow
to the west. ~ Ken Craft

I do love Oregon." My gaze wanders over the quiet, natural beauty surrounding us, which isn't limited to just this garden. "Being near the river, and the ocean, and the rocky mountains, and all this nature ... the weather."
He chuckles. "I've never met anyone who actually loves rain. It's kind of weird. But cool, too," he adds quickly, as if afraid to offend me. "I just don't get it."
I shrug. "It's not so much that I love rain. I just have a healthy respect for what if does. People hate it, but the world needs rain. It washes away dirt, dilutes the toxins in the air, feeds drought. It keeps everything around us alive."
"Well, I have a healthy respect for what the sun does," he counters with a smile."
"I'd rather have the sun after a good, hard rainfall."
He just shakes his head at me but he's smiling. "The good with the bad?"
"Isn't that life?"
He frowns. "Why do I sense a metaphor behind that?"
"Maybe there is a metaphor behind that." One I can't very well explain to him without describing the kinds of things I see every day in my life. The underbelly of society - where twisted morals reign and predators lurk, preying on the lost, the broken, the weak, the innocent. Where a thirteen-year-old sells her body rather than live under the same roof as her abusive parents, where punks gang-rape a drunk girl and then post pictures of it all over the internet so the world can relive it with her. Where a junkie mom's drug addiction is readily f ~ K.A. Tucker

There is some CO2-water vapor feedback. But it's not operating on a global scale. The modellers cannot accurately separate water vapour from the effects of clouds and rainfall. ~ Willie Soon

The record rainfall and storm surges that have brought flooding across the UK are a clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change. ~ Nicholas Stern

In 2005 ... Mumbai, India, saw that country's most intense recorded instance of rainfall - 3 feet of rain in twenty-four hours. ~ Joseph J. Romm

After every rainfall there's a rainbow because rainbows are a promise. A promise that there will always be a light in the darkness. That's why they are too beautiful to overlook.' His hand crept along my cheek, brushing away the fallen strands of my hair. The same strange look came over him, as if he wasn't present at all, but somewhere else, in a strange memory. "You, Norah, are our light."
I swallowed hard. "Where's the darkness?"
His eyes were trained, like he was under a spell, unable to move away or stop looking at me. "Where you aren't. ~ Angela Parkhurst

Trees are affected by many factors. Global warming is changing rainfall, humidity, air composition, solar radiation, heating and cooling. Plants are sensitive to any of these factors. When all of the factors start to change at once, it may lead to devastation in the plant world. ~ Steven Magee

There are some who relish the quiet life. Free of the frantic and discord. I used to be one of them; until my life got loud and dramatic, down right unbearable at moments.
And now I love the volumes of my life. The adagio of my heart's beating or the metronome of the rainfall. How can one expect to live without the welcome of the bird's chirp in the morning or the night's vehement winds pounding our window pane?
The sound of joy, heartbreak, ecstasy. It is all for the fine tuning of our soul. We learn to calibrate the sounds of life. No more sensitivity, but making it all music. Go ahead, appreciate the soundtrack of your life. It makes for good dancing too. ~ Emmanuella Raphaelle

There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it indeed seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. ~ Joseph Heller

My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain - and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place. ~ Boris Johnson

I want you to know how perfect
your body looks after a shower.
Fresh.
Covered in little drops
of water.
Just like dewy grass after
a night of rainfall. ~ Sheri Rosa

One tragic example of the loss of forests and then water is found in Ethiopia. The amount of its forested land has decreased from 40 to 1 percent in the last four decades. Concurrently, the amount of rainfall has declined to the point where the country is rapidly becoming a wasteland. ~ Al Gore

LXVII

INDOORS the fire is kindled;
Beechwood is piled on the hearthstone;
Cold are the chattering oak-leaves;
And the ponds frost-bitten.

Softer than rainfall at twilight,
Bringing the fields benediction
And the hills quiet and greyness,
Are my long thoughts of thee.

How should thy friend fear the seasons?
They only perish of winter
Whom Love, audacious and tender,
Never hath visited. ~ Sappho

The global aid community is mobilised into fighting drought in a district that gets 1,500 mm of rainfall annually. The reverse spiral begins. Donor governments love emergency relief. It forms a negligible part of their spending, but makes for great advertising. (Emergencies of many sorts do this, not just drought. You can run television footage of the Marines kissing babies in Somalia.) There are more serious issues between rich and poor nations - like unequal trade. Settling those would be of greater help to the latter. But for that, the 'donors' would have to part with something for real. No. They prefer emergency relief. ~ P.Sainath

Geographically the island had dramatic coastline of secret coves and forests. It was surrounded by water of turquoise color and reef. It had rich, fertile lands and a very hot temperature all year round. All year the temperature averaged 105 degrees. It got a bit cooler at night but people could still sleep under the stars and sky. It had very little rainfall and no snow or frost. Temperatures dropped a little in the winter". ~ Annette J. Dunlea

I've been avoiding you because I'm just so damn annoyed ... " He shakes his head, sloshing water. The strands brush his shoulders rhythmically. "I don't want you risking yourself again. The human world ... Will. It's too dangerous." Cassian takes my hand. I feel his heartbeat through the simple touch, the thud of his life meeting with mine. "You dead ... it would break me." His voice whips sharply over the drum of the rainfall. "Everything I ever said to you was the truth. My feelings haven't changed for you, Jacinda. Even if you drive me crazy, here, in the pride ... you're still that single bright light for me. ~ Sophie Jordan

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn't afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn't hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all eginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space.
Death is water's close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatilitiy of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn't belong to us, be we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth. ~ Emmi Itaranta

The equatorial monsoons which brought a rainy season to the coasts had small effect here in the highlands, from moon to moon, the rainfall varied little. Winter, summer, autumn, spring were involuted, turning in upon themselves, a slow circling of time. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled. ~ Anne Michaels

I see now how things even up, how they are squared away, and how they balance under the law of love and justice. No year of life is emotionally, spiritually or even materially, all drought or all rainfall; nor is it all sun. The road turns a little every day, and one day there's a sudden twist we didn't dream was there, and for every loss there is somewhere a gain, for every grief a happiness, for every deprivation a giving. ~ Faith Baldwin

. . . what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough - it is said - to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. ~ Joseph Conrad

The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard.

School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob's glass and other merchandise. Jacob seized him and presented him to the class. 'Boys and girls, this specimen here is a Peddler. You don't see them very often. They migrate, like the geese flying over. This one comes maybe once a year, like Christmas. But he ain't dependable, like Christmas. He's dependable like rainfall. A Peddler is a feller who has got things you ain't got, and he'll give 'em to ye, and then after you're glad you got 'em he'll tell ye how much cash money you owe him fer 'em. If you ain't got cash money, he'll give credit, and collect the next time he comes 'round, and meantime you work hard to git the money someway so's ye kin pay him off. Look at his eyes. Notice how they are kinder shiftly-like. Now, class, the first question is: why is this feller's eyes shiftly-like? ~ Donald Harington

[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature - a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules - out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. ~ Jacob Bronowski

Many diseases including malaria, dengue, meningitis - just a few examples - these are what we call climate-sensitive diseases, because such climate dimensions for rainfall, humidity and temperature would influence the epidemics, the outbreaks, either directly influencing the parasites or the mosquitoes that carry them. ~ Margaret Chan

Compare the air to a forest. When forest fires occur regularly, there is less fuel for any one fire, so the burns don't become conflagrations. If you prevent forest fires and build up a huge mass of living and dead wood in the forest, when a burn at last occurs, it is likely to be serious and large. When increased atmospheric carbon warms the air and when more vapor is available, conflagrational storms become more likely.
[...]
Will the pattern of storms be seen in the future as an anomaly? Or with so much more water vapor in the air, is it now normal? 'Everyone talks about global warming,' said Gavin Schmidt, head of the NASA climate models at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 'but changes in rainfall often have a bigger impact. We're forcing the climate into a state we have not seen for millions of years ~ William Bryant Logan

What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimeters of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day. ~ Mike McCormack

Soon the trees affected not only her mood but her understanding. Each year a trunk put on a new ring of growth, and within those rings she found the tree's own story. She listened to the scent of it, the feel, the sound, and her mind gave it words- soil, water, sap, light ... and before, night and rain, dry and sun, wind and night ... the drowsy stillness of leaves in a rainfall, the sparkling eagerness of leaves in the sun, and always the pulling up of the branches, the tugging down of the roots, the forever growing in tow directions, joing sky and soil, and a center to keep it strong ...
-Rin, Forest Born ~ Shannon Hale

As an angler and a gardener, I cherish each drop of rain that falls. ~ Fennel Hudson

Gaia giveth even as she taketh away.

The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity's unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits.

Now we could grow oysters in New England.

Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters.

Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine.

The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy.

But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defense, poachers would be found. ~ Paul Di Filippo

From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones
coming soon:
In the torrential downpour with water swirling that threatened to pull her down, she didn't see the voice's owner. The hurricane had blessed the entire city with a surprise drenching. All weather reports had predicted it to pass over with sporadic rainfall but that didn't happen. The storm settled over Houston as if it had no intention to move on. Cassie flailed in panic as the roof of her car disappeared under the water twenty feet beyond. She prayed once more that the container in it was watertight. And that she'd see her car again. Then she concentrated on living. Where had the voice come from? ~ Shelley K. Wall

The beetle, endemic to Africa's Namib desert - where there is just 1.3 cm of rainfall a year - has inspired a few proof-of-concepts in the academic community, but this is the first time a self-filling water bottle has been proposed. The beetle survives by collecting condensation from the ocean breeze on the hardened shell of its wings. The shell is covered in tiny bumps that are water attracting (hydrophilic) at their tips and water-repelling (hydrophobic) at their sides. The beetle extends and aims the wings at incoming sea breezes to catch humid air; tiny droplets 15 to 20 microns in diameter eventually accumulate on its back and run straight down towards its mouth. NBD ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Why is the forest such an effective agent in the prevention of soil erosion and in feeding
the springs and rivers? The forest does two things: (1) the trees and undergrowth break up
the rainfall into fine spray and the litter on the ground protects the soil from erosion; (2)
the residues of the trees and animal life met with in all woodlands are converted into
humus, which is then absorbed by the soil underneath, increasing its porosity and waterholding
power. The soil cover and the soil humus together prevent erosion and at the same
time store large volumes of water. These factors -- soil protection, soil porosity, and water
retention -- conferred by the living forest cover, provide the key to the solution of the soil
erosion problem." (An Agricultural Testament) ~ Albert Howard