Jul 11, 2009

Liters of rain

You can’t understand a watershed until you think in its numbers.



Case in point is the rain barrel.

I’ve been walking all over Belgium with the Old Florida way of thinking stuck in my head:

Each barrel holds 42.5 gallons … right?


Technically, yes.

But from a translational standpoint, I might as well be speaking Greek, or Chinese … or any other language you don’t know (for me it’s all of them except English):

Nobody knows what a gallon is in Belgium.



The standard unit of measurement is liters.

Each rain barrel holds 161 of them …



But they have to be full!

4 comments:

Lindy said...

Those interesting Euros and their metric system. Comes in handy in the States when buying large bottles of soda, but I don't see it used any other times. Also, great Dead reference on the label.

Robert V. Sobczak said...

That's a great point Lindy. Why do we buy 2 "liters" of coke, but a "gallon" of milk? I'll have to look into that. As for the musical reference, I sort of had Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" in the back of my head, but you are right: "Box of Rain" works equally well. They are two tunes, as a hydrologist, I find myself going back to time and time again.

Janie said...

Too bad we don't use international units. That would make conversions unnecessary, and I really hate doing conversions.

britney said...

nice post and thanks for sharing....

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