So much for dinner in the back garden!

One is frequently reminded that - living in the mountains as we do - the weather you may experience may be a completely different experience for someone quite nearby.

There are no official weather stations here in SMA.  We have no airport of our own, hence no official weather station.  However, there are unofficial or private weather stations: one in the colonia in which we live, one closer to Centro, and one out in the campo on the north side of town.  They are each connected to the Weather Underground so their uploaded results are readable on the Wunderground website.

The weather station out in the campo even summarizes the data from the other two stations and reports all three on their web page.  The differences between the locations is very obvious when the reports are shown side-by-side.  We've been told this all along, but when it's presented graphically, it's hard to ignore. The station in the campo reports hotter and colder temperatures, day and night, than the stations in town where our particular architecture tends to level things off.   The variations between day and night are lessened since the presence of buildings slows both the heating of the city and the cooling at night.  The masonary buildings are slow to warm during the day and slow to cool off at night because of their composition.

The greatest difference is when it rains.  A neighborhood in another part of town can get a vastly different amount of rain that we do at our house.  A recent spate of storms delivered over 3 inches of rain at the house, while friends in the same colonia received over 6 inches!  What a difference a few blocks (and the differences in geography) can make!

However, because our weather stations are unofficial, we never received weather forecasts in the past.  Only recently www.weather.com has begun posting forecasts for SMA.  And they're fairly accurate, temperature-wise.  Although during the summer there is often a chance of rain predicted on most days, we've learned to not expect any precipitation unless the prediction is at least 80 - 90%.

So imagine our surprise this evening when a faint roll of thunder was followed by rain spattering the pavement in the back yard.  The rain prediction for today was only 60% at most. We had gone ahead with plans for dining in the back garden instead of inside based on the forecast.  We'd just prepared the salads and baked ziti with sausage and meatballs when it started to rain!

Well, as it turned out, perhaps 'rain' is too strong a word.  Prolonged heavy sprinkling might be more accurate.  At any rate, dining al fresco was out of the question.  So we took our plates into the office and I'm trying not to spill any pasta sauce on the keyboard as I write!

The sun is out once again, the thunder had faded (though there's some again right now), and the pavement has begun to dry.  If it rains a bit more, perhaps we'll not need to water the lawn today after all.

[For historical accuracy, last night's precipitation amounted to 8.4mm or 1/3-inch including that which fell at the dinner hour and a bit later - around 9pm.]