I find myself humming the Beatles "Rain" whenever it starts pouring down here in Tucson. Luckily, I haven't been caught out in it, though it has helped me to fall asleep at night with the tap tap tapping of the rain.
Looks like we get quite a bit of rain where we are, because being at the foothills of the mountains means that we get spillover from the convection created by the wind and the hills. Which got me to thinking the other day: are cumulus clouds created from regular clouds, and the fact that they're cumulus clouds mean that rain is coming, or do cumulus clouds float around for weeks on end, until they spot a little league game where the pitcher's just a few batters away from a no-hitter, and then start raining?
The "regular clouds become cumulus clouds" theory seems nice; a normal, safe-altitude, stable, cloud drifts over some massively hot area, and the rising heat makes the cloud start drifting upward in spades, until the moisture that was drifting along becomes unstable, and rains down a reign of terror.
To be continued, when I'm not writing two proposals at the same time, and shepherding another one through contracts, and running behind on my publications, and in desperate need of an espresso. Mmmmm, coffee.