As I'm sure many of you have gathered, I am a bit obsessive when it comes to numbers. I love to add, subtract, multiply and divide them. I really get into statistics; I like figuring up averages and the like. While this penchant gets applied to various sectors of my life, one area that preoccupies my time is related to weather and weather data.
This is not unusual for folks with Asperger's. We tend to focus undue amounts of time and energy on, sometimes, arcane subject matter. Since early childhood, I've been obsessed with the sinking of the Titanic, Custer's so-called Last Stand, and, of course, odd statistics. Re the latter, I used to spend hour upon hour figuring out weird statistics for all my thousands of baseball cards!
Since it rains a good deal of the time here in South Bend, one of my new favorite pastimes is factoring the amount of rain we receive in any given period versus the average for that period. To wit, in the period from May 1 - August 31, the average amount of rainfall for this area is 9.79" (2.45" avg/month). If we include September in this computation, the average amount of rainfall is 13.03" (2.61" avg/month). In this small neck of the world, May through September represents our dry season.
We're blowing those averages out the window this year! For the month of May plus the first two days of June, we already have 11.46" in the rain gauge. That's 1.67" more than we would normally receive by August 31 and another storm is forecast to roll in tonight.
Even if we extend the end date to September 30, we only need 1.57" inches more over the next nearly 4 months (120 days) to hit the average. We could suffer through an extended drought and yet still exceed the norm for this period. Statistically speaking, that blows me mind!
The annual water year runs from October 1 - September 30. (I have no idea why these dates are chosen.) At the rate we're going, we will most likely end this water year at 2 FEET of precip or more above average. Of course, you know you'll see another post of this nature around October 1 once I've tabulated all my scintillating data for the year. :-D
This is not unusual for folks with Asperger's. We tend to focus undue amounts of time and energy on, sometimes, arcane subject matter. Since early childhood, I've been obsessed with the sinking of the Titanic, Custer's so-called Last Stand, and, of course, odd statistics. Re the latter, I used to spend hour upon hour figuring out weird statistics for all my thousands of baseball cards!
Since it rains a good deal of the time here in South Bend, one of my new favorite pastimes is factoring the amount of rain we receive in any given period versus the average for that period. To wit, in the period from May 1 - August 31, the average amount of rainfall for this area is 9.79" (2.45" avg/month). If we include September in this computation, the average amount of rainfall is 13.03" (2.61" avg/month). In this small neck of the world, May through September represents our dry season.
We're blowing those averages out the window this year! For the month of May plus the first two days of June, we already have 11.46" in the rain gauge. That's 1.67" more than we would normally receive by August 31 and another storm is forecast to roll in tonight.
Even if we extend the end date to September 30, we only need 1.57" inches more over the next nearly 4 months (120 days) to hit the average. We could suffer through an extended drought and yet still exceed the norm for this period. Statistically speaking, that blows me mind!
The annual water year runs from October 1 - September 30. (I have no idea why these dates are chosen.) At the rate we're going, we will most likely end this water year at 2 FEET of precip or more above average. Of course, you know you'll see another post of this nature around October 1 once I've tabulated all my scintillating data for the year. :-D
When I was younger I always enjoyed when our location beat the normal rainfall averages. After all, "may you live in interesting times."
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