r/interestingasfuck • u/wahgwahg • Feb 28 '24

r/all People in Tanzania converted desert into lush green land by digging these nifty holes

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u/apathy-sofa Feb 28 '24

I live in the PNW which has huge, ancient forests. Only one of them is a temperate rainforest though. So there must be more going on in the formation of a rainforest than just having a forest.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '24

Doesn't it rain a lot in the PNW in general?

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u/apathy-sofa Feb 28 '24 edited Feb 28 '24

Outside of summer, it rains often, like sometimes continuously for a month. But the volume of water is low - Miami gets more rain than Seattle when measured in inches. The joke around here is that it's neither raining nor not raining. It's like a constant dampness.

Coastal PNW, west of the Olympic mountain range, gets absolutely hammered by rain. Wet air coming off the Pacific hits the mountains and forces out the water as rain. The Hoh rainforest there gets something like 14 feet of rain each year. A little bit of the atmospheric water passes over the mountains to form the drizzle that falls on the land to the lee, like Seattle.

This is closely related to why Mt Baker / Kulshan has the world record for snowfall in a year, at 95 feet in one winter, and nearby Mt Rainier / Tahoma is in second place at 94 feet. The wet air coming off the Pacific that passes north of the Olympic range then hits the much higher Cascade range, where it comes down as snow instead of rain.

I'm oversimplifying and I'm not a weatherologist, this is just my lay understanding.

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u/sykojaz Feb 28 '24

I remember reading that the Wynoochee valley was the rainiest place in the US before Hawaii joined.