Saturday, September 22, 2018

Fall into fall with orphan storms

Oh, the higher temps in the middle of the week were dismaying (36 C in September can just shove off), but some of the turmoil in the gulf has been drifting north, bringing lots and lots of rain and some relief.

These are, as far as I've read recently, unnamed tropical depressions or some sort of disturbance. I don't know what they're officially called. They don't make it into hurricanes or even storms; they get tagged with some alpha-numeric code and then they just fall apart into anonymous strips of thunder.

I'm sort of torn. I'm glad these storms don't coalesce into something more devastating, because they're strong enough. I was stuck in a heavy downpour late last night, and my wipers were barely fast enough. Fortunately, traffic was light, I mostly remembered where most of the lane markers were, and I have AWD and wasn't going anywhere deep (flash floods happen here for some reason), so it was oddly peaceful apart from the one tiny part where thankfully only one side of my car suddenly hit a few inches of moving water...on an overpass. Like, how does that happen? I understand the very basic tenets of fluid dynamics but how does that much water collect that quickly?

However, I also appreciate what these storms have done to our weather and I wish there was more recognition, anthropomorphism or not. I had consistent ass sweat up until November last year, so this pre-fall/fall has already been a big improvement. We needed rain too (maybe not this much), so why not name these storms as well? Why must only the big bad ones get named and not also the milder and largely beneficial systems?

So I'm adopting this storm, whatever it is that's going on this week (maybe it's been two or more storms total, but I'm not sure what's going on). I'm calling her Emma. Remnants of Emma? What could have been Emma? Relief Emma? What's the technical term here?

Oh, and I've run a few times this week.  Today was three miles in between the bouts of rain.

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