Day 33

I'm in a sea of cardboard boxes in anticipation for our shift next weekend so my journey of Self Improvement has been temporarily replaced by Self Preservation as I battle boxes, kids pulling packed things out of boxes, husbands looking at boxes but not quite doing anything with them yet, as well as rodents, general chaos and grime as well as the gut wrenching DISAPPOINTMENT that a story I submitted didn't make it's destination due to technology and (ahem) me.  I was going to write about my new discovery of sugar soap (kiwi friends is sugar soap an australian thing or am I just particularly grubby, ergo rodent evidence?), but then I blamed a slow news day for another equally lame post so I'm going to switch to my battery backup and pull some safe, easy topics out of my "things I should know" notebook, instead of look for insightful, thought provoking and mentally taxing (for me) topics.  Seriously, could that sentence have been any longer?  Guess I packed my editing skills away in one of those boxes.

So, a perennial fave, the weather.
I fell in love with a series on TV a while ago.  Being an Extreme Weather Girl, I love the thought of hottest, coldest, windiest....places on earth and there was this awesome guy Nick Middleton, who travelled the globe in search of weather extremes, my kind of guy!  You can see it coming right...but every now and then I'll pop a wee weather gem in, and I know as The Sister and Kristin also love their weather at least I'll have two satisfied readers....

So where is the wettest place on Earth? (or in other words, the place with the highest rainfall)

Mawsynram is a village in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya state in north-eastern India,  It is reportedly the wettest place on Earth, with an annual rainfall of 11,872 mm. According to the Guinness Book of World Records Mawsynram received an incredible 26,000mm in 1985. 
Three reasons can be cited for high rainfall at Mawsynram:

1. The warm moist winds of the northward-moving air from the Bay of Bengal during the monsoon, which cover an extensive area but are forced to converge into the narrower zone over the Khasi Hills, thus concentrating their moisture.
2. The alignment of the Khasi Hills (east to west) places them directly in the path of the airflow from the Bay of Bengal, producing a significant uplift (plus cooling, further condensation and thus more rain).
3. Finally, uplift over the Khasi Hills is virtually continuous in the monsoon period because the lifted air is constantly being pulled up by vigorous winds in the upper atmosphere, hence the rainfall is more or less continuous.

I do love a good rainfall, and with The Husband and I both keen to head to India over the next few years, I'm just wondering if I can sneak this into our itinerary.  Not much use of a brolly in Sydney over the last 6 months or so!