How 'bout respect for the rain?

There’s always a better way to do something.

Let’s talk about measuring rainfall.

Last Sunday night at my house, there was a great lightning show, complete with window-rattling claps of thunder.

The weather station a few blocks away reported we received 1/100th of an inch of rain.

That’s not nothing on our parched Plains, but it seemed like nothing when I saw it written down.

Who’s in charge of PR for rain? They’re doing a lousy job.

We got 1/100th of an inch of rain. It’s hard to write and it’s hard to say. It wouldn’t attract a single reader if we put it in a newspaper headline.

In this age of “alternate facts,” I’d like to propose a different way to record rainfall.

I think it would be more accurate — and certainly it would make us all feel better — if we reported rainfall in gallons per acre, instead of by how many micro-inches we receive in a cylinder on the fence.

Let’s use last weekend’s sprinkling as an example.

Instead of a pathetic report of 1/100th of an inch of rain that wouldn’t make page 39 in the Stevens Family Gazette, we get a front-page headline: “Heavens spill 272 gallons per acre.”

The water science school website — water.usgs.gov — gives us a chart for converting rainfall amounts so it’s an easy fix.

If we see 1/10th of an inch of rain in that gauge on the fence, that equals 2,715 gallons per acre.

A half inch of rain: That’s 13,575 gallons per acre.

And imagine the joy of receiving 3 inches of rain, or 81,450 gallons per acre, in just a few hours.

Steve Kersh, the TV meteorologist from Amarillo, agrees with me that rain is a big deal and deserves more respect.

“(A)ny rainfall is important to especially agricultural interests,” he wrote in an email.

Rain means the world to corn farmers, he said.

Kersh said he doesn’t know why we measure rain in inches, just that it’s been established by the World Meteorological Organization.

“In other parts of the world where the metric system is being used, they use millimeters instead of hundredths of an inch and centimeters of rain vs. inches of rain,” he wrote.

That’s better, too.

Instead of 1/100th of an inch, we could say we received 25.4 millimeters.

Same amount of rain, more respect for the wet.

I’m writing to the World Meteorological Organization right now.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]

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