Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreA famous scientist Konrad Lorenz, who studied animal behavior, used to give his students the assignment to watch animals and see what patterns they would notice. He would sometimes have them sit in front of a fish tank for a long time and write down what behavior they noticed, without referencing their school knowledge. The idea was to increase their ability to notice things, and also make conjectures about what they noticed.
Now you can do a similar exercise with the water cycle. One interesting exercise is to look at the evolution of rainfall across the globe over time, and see what patterns you notice. There’s a website you can do this on called Ventusky.com. The site gives you these beautiful pictures of wind patterns, temperature, humidity, and pressure around the globe. You can then click play and watch as these variables change over time. See what you notice.
A while back as I was doing this, I noticed that there was a thin stream of rain that occurred around the equator, which was there most of the time. Around the rest of the earth, the rainfall movement followed these flowy plume-like shapes, moving for a while, and then disappearing. There were tendrils that grew, swirled, and then vanished.
As I was watching, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of rainfall always over the Amazon, a little south of the thin equatorial stripe of rain. Why was this? Well this seemed to me evidence that the Amazon rainforest is generating its own rain. Usually in other places the rain gets blown all over the place, but the rainfall over the Amazon is steadier because the forest is continually transpiring. The forest can absorb a lot more rainfall, and then over time it can release moisture from its leaves back into the atmosphere.
I wondered if I would see a similar pattern over the Congo rainforest too. As I studied these time lapse videos more, I noticed the Congo rainforest also had a steady pulse of rain over it. And around the Indonesian archipelago, there were also rainfall patches that remained steady. I wondered, why was that? Was there a rainforest there too? I hadn’t heard of a rainforest there before.
So I looked it up, and lo and behold there was a rainforest there; the Indonesian rainforest is the third largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon and Congo rainforests!
Here is a timelapse video I made of the rainfall on the Ventusky site. It shows how the rain patterns evolve over a month.
What do you notice?
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