Serious rain

This morning I was browsing the NZ Herald to see what the wapiti hunters are up to, and found the answer to be "their necks in rain".  I was struck by the entry on the second page "Rainfall measuring 793mm had doused the Fiordland National Park and Southland district since Saturday night."  This seemed like a pretty serious lot of rain.

I recalled Denis Wilson blogging about the heavy rain.  He has since emailed to say "Back in February, we had, cumulative total, over 5 days of 267mm (or 10.5 inches - in the old money)".

I couldn't believe that NZ would whup us that easily so checked the climate extremes page of the Bureau of Meteorology.  I have to say that 12.5 metres of rain in a year seemed a tad excessive!   Then I googled the world record (and was surprised to be referred back to the BoM site.   I will let you check the details, but 1861 definitely seems to have been a bad time to take a holiday in Cherripunji!  (I found the double log scale approach very interesting.)

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