A Clarification

Every once in a while I’m reminded that I’m not writing in a vacuum. Real people, sometimes not even related to me, check in here and keep me honest.

Yesterday an alert reader noticed that I had a questionable claim in a posting I wrote more than a year ago. In it, I called Kauai the rainiest place in the world because it gets 350 days of rain annually. This may make Kauai the place with the most monotonous weather forecast, but it is not actually the rainiest spot on the globe. Parts of Kauai get about 400 inches of rain a year, which is a lot, but not as much as the village of Mawsynram, in India’s Meghalaya State. This sodden spot gets 467 inches of rain every year, making Mawsynram a strong contender for the world’s rainiest place.

Of course a much more glaring error is my contention in the same posting that we didn’t need any more rain in northern California. In spite of a rainy January, last winter’s rainfall was below average, as I recall. And now we’re in a drought, with very little rain having fallen in January of this year. I take it back! We could use some rain now.