My rain gage got it’s first test the other day. We got a nice 1 7/10" of rain in there. The water line is just barely visible under the bottom holder bracket.
And yes BillyBob in Kansas, your rain gage is metric because it measures in tenths of an inch. So take that! You commie pinkos in California!
As a side note: We got a light frost last night. It got down to 31F/-1C at some point last night. Not a hard enough frost to kill the bell pepper plants outright, but it did singe and tip the leaves a bit this morning.
Billy-Bob replies: the use of tenths makes it decimal but not necessarily metric
I’m so used to seeing the weatherperson talk about getting 7 tenths of an inch (that’s a good day’s rain hereabouts) I never noticed it’s not halves and quarters like with teaspoons.
I think it’s interesting that at large scales, when talking about land use, agriculture, flood risk, etc., the standard unit of measure for water volume in the U.S. is acre-foot.
Well it seems to make sense for flooding! And irrigation as well. I guess metric folks use hectares, but I wonder if it causes problems when they have walled fields that were originally sized by oxen doing a day’s plowing at a time.
Nah, the redneck joke is BillyBob doesn’t know the difference. And he doesn’t know BillyBob should have a hyphen either.
Weather peoples talk in tenths of an inch for rain and often use fractions of an inch for snow fall around here. Go figure. Conversationally, people will turn .2" of an inch of rain into 1/4" inch of rain. I know I’m guilty of doing it. Instead of saying I had an 1.7" of rain in the rain gauge, I will tell my neighbor we had an 1 3/4" of rain. Does it make sense? No, it doesn’t. And no one cares either.
I admit I turn the tenths into quarters in my head as well.
But with snow (our mountains get it) I’ve mostly heard the meteorologist talk about it in feet, or fractions of feet. I have a notion that a foot of snow and an inch of water are about the same amount of water, but no idea if that’s correct.
How much water there is in an inch of snow varies, and often by a noticeable amount. A foot of snow that falls when it’s say 20F/-6C has less water in it than a wet, heavy snow fall at 36F/2C. And the snow that falls at -30F/-34C has a whole lot less than either.
But 1 cubic foot of “average snow”, for those in the general US area, is roughly 1" of water. Close enough for us Cletus’.
They sell tape measures with 1/10 feet units. Inches and feet are cursed enough as it is, and now they combine it with decimal.
Yes they do. Though they are not common. But some people need do that.