The incredible forces of Mother Nature have always intrigued me. Consider this for a minute:
Yesterday, we had a rain storm across Norfolk County. It was the usual scenario, one that has been playing itself out for thousands or years and will continue to do so for at least the foreseeable future, climate change notwithstanding.
It had been a warm day, up to a maximum of 21 C. It rained moderately for a couple of hours just before a cold front swept through, dropping the temperature behind it to 10 C. According to the Environment Canada website, 12 mm of rain fell at Delhi, just down the road. No big deal, it happens all the time.
Where things get interesting is when you start looking at the numbers. The area of Norfolk County is 1,609.95 square kilometres, about 2.5 times that of the City of Toronto at 661 square kilometres. Assuming that the rain fell evenly across Norfolk County, we do the calculation for the total volume of rain in cubic metres as follows:
1,609.95 x 1,000 x 1,000 x .012 = 19,283,400 cubic freakin' metres!
Yes, that is right, more than 19 million cubic meters. If one were to lay these end-to-end, the wall of water, 1 metre high and 1 metre wide, would reach halfway around the world, before it would run out.
Now, let's take this one step further. That water just didn't happen to get there on its own. It had to evaporate from the ocean to get here. In yesterday's case, it most likely came from the Gulf of Mexico. OK, it takes 600 calories to evaporate 1 gram of water, so that's 600,000 calories for 1 litre or 600,000,000 (600 million) for 1 cubic metre.
This is where it gets really handy to have the Command Window of Visual FoxPro handy, as the numbers get so large, it's easy to lose track. (Even handier to have the _CLIPTEXT system variable available). To evaporate all that water
19,283,400 x 600,000,000 = 11,570,040,000,000,000 calories are needed
Sorry, but I don't know how to pronounce that number. Nevertheless, we carry on. We convert this number to Joules. By the way, 1 Joule is about the equivalent to the amount of energy you expend when you lift a small apple 1 metre off the ground.
11,570,040,000,000,000 calories = 48,409,047,360,000,010 Joules
Now, although a beautiful unit of the metric system in its own right, the Joule is exceedingly meaningless to most people. So let's try kW (kilowatt-hour)
48,409,047,360,000,010 Joules = 13,447,065,175 kW/hr or roughly 13.5 million Megawatt/hr
To put this into perspective, the Nanticoke Power generation station on Lake Erie generates 4,000 Megawatt/hr. It would have to run 3,361 hours (that's about 20 weeks) at full bore to generate that amount of power.
Yet another way:
48,409,047,360,000,010 Joules = 45,891,776,897,279 BTU/hr
An average house furnace is about 100,000 BTU/hr, so it would take 458,917,768 (that's 458 million) house furnaces burning solid for 1 hour to evaporate the water involved.
And I'm only talking Norfolk County!
Furthermore, I haven't even talked about the energy involved to transport the water vapor 2,000 km from the Gulf of Mexico to Norfolk County.
Some useful formulas:
1 calorie = 4.18400 joules
1 Joule = 2.7778×10−7 kilowatt-hour (or otherwise 0.00000027778 kilowatt-hour)
1 Joule = 9.48×10−4 BTU (or otherwise 0.000948 BTU)
Sitting down at my computer in the basement, I heard a rustle in the leaves collected in the window well. This drew my curiosity, as it drew his. The stare-off was a draw: he went his way and I went mine, though not until after I had rattled off some shots on the 20D.
Spring has been very mild this year, and everything is way ahead of normal. I already saw some fruit trees in bloom. The birds, well they do what comes naturally this time of year. They're all lovy-dovy. Just check out these mourning doves who where carrying on (and all now) in the crab apple tree up front. 
The hours around dawn and dusk are what photographers call the magic hour, since that's when the light plays tricks on our eyes with its softness and long shadows. At that time, I love to take a walk to deep in the back yard, and then just stand there, looking back. Usually this time of year there is little wind then, so everything is so still and quiet, except for the cardinals singing their majestic song. Spine tingling/bone chilling. Here's the shot from way back there. I tried to record the cardinals' song, but I'm going to have to run out to Radio Shack to git me a microphone pre-amp, as it just wasn't loud enough. You really do need to see the larger version of this shot to even remotely get an idea as to what I'm talking about.
Then I took a walk in the forest, and lo and behold, I saw a trillium in bloom! In April! Most of our trilliums are red, white ones are somewhat rare around here for whatever reason.
