Friday, August 15, 2003 The end of rainy season...oh, wait It's raining. And raining. And raining. It started raining at about oh-dark-thirty yesterday morning, a steady soaking downpour, and it has not stopped since, maybe 36 hours later. And more rain is predicted for tomorrow. Again, not that I welcome the ridiculous heat and humidity of a Tokyo summer, but the on-again-off-again rainy season is just plain weird. There's a rhythm to the seasons, and this sort of stuff is upsetting. And it appears to be global, if this story I just now pulled up from the Christian Science Monitor is true: Behind this summer's wild, tragic weather By Peter N. Spotts Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Your instincts about the weather are probably right: It has been a weird summer worldwide. It's not just the egg-cooking temperatures in Europe, which, tragically, have been blamed for as many as 3,000 deaths in France alone [emphasis mine]. While Parisians have been able to caramelize crème brûlée on the street and turned fountains into splash pools, residents of America's Northeast have looked, mostly in vain, for rain-free weekends at the beach. In the Southwest, persistent triple-digit temperatures wouldn't just fry eggs; it would char them asphalt-black, without mesquite flavor. From Denver to Delhi, it's been the kind of summer where, rain or shine, the place to be, it seems, is indoors. Even climatologists, who have seen or studied it all, haven't seen this pattern in such a strong and persistent form. No firm conclusions why in the article, but I wonder how persitent this trend is. 2:42:14 PM    Comment on this post! []