* 39% is our share of normal rainfall at Birmingham Airport so far this year.
* 7.22 inches is all we have received.
* 11.26 inches is our shortfall. This is a major deficiency. The way rain falls determines greatly how beneficial it is. When we are very dry, like we are now, a 2-inch rain falling in one hour is not nearly as beneficial as 1 inch falling slowly over a period of 6 or 8 hours. The heavy quick rain doesn’t have time to soak in and is mostly run off. However, a quick 2-inch rain is more beneficial to streams and reservoirs, because it runs off quickly toward those places.
* 22 inches is how much rain Central Park in New York City has received this year. That is three times as much as Birmingham has received.
* 14 inches is the Boston rain total so far this year, which is double that of Birmingham.
* 17 inches is all the snow that Boston got this winter and spring. That is a huge deficiency. It is 27 inches less than their normal snowfall. Last year they had received 40 inches by this time. The northeast has had a tough winter, but the real big snows have been in places like Upstate New York, New Hampshire and Vermont.
* 3.5 million sandbags is how many were used at Grand Forks, North Dakota 10 years ago to try to prevent their historic flood disaster. The efforts failed and there was massive flooding downtown. Fire broke out devastating downtown Grand Forks.
* 4.1 billion dollars was the price tag of that Grand Forks disaster.
* 97% of the world’s water is undrinkable. It is salt water in the oceans.
* 3% of the world’s water is fresh water.
* 2/3 of that 3% is ice locked in glaciers and the vast polar ice caps, especially Antarctica.
* 67 mph was how high the wind was gusting this morning atop Mt. Washington, New Hampshire. It was only two days ago that they clocked wind gusts to 156 mph during that historic north nor’easter.
* 200 thousand was the estimated number of people killed by a tidal wave on November 13, 1970 in East Pakistan. The tidal wave was driven by a cyclone that moved in from the Bay of Bengal. Those numbers are hard to fathom.
* 18 is how many people were killed in Alabama by lightning in the 10-year period 1995-2004. During that time, we ranked twelfth in the nation.
* 85 people was how many were killed in Florida by lightning during the same 10-year period.
* 12 was the coldest temperature ever recorded in Hawaii. It can get quite cold in the highest elevations and they can also get some good snow cover. That 12-degree low occurred on May 17, 1979 at Mauna Kea at an elevation of 13,770 feet.
* 100 was the hottest temperature ever recorded in Hawaii on April 27, 1931 at Pahala. Amazingly, that is the same as the record high for Alaska, which occurred on June 27, 1915 at Ft. Yukon way up in North Alaska north of the Brooks Range.
* 9.47 inches is the average annual rainfall in Albuquerque. By comparison, the Birmingham average is 54 inches.
* 66.29 is the normal annual rainfall for Mobile, about 1 foot more than Birmingham.
* 3 is how many cups of coffee I had today. I am thinking about declaring war on coffee consumption.
* 25 years is how long I have drunk coffee out of the same coffee cup. That cup was a gift to me from my sister-in-law, Peggy Siegel, from Layton, Utah. It had an inscription “XBG.” That stood for Ex-Big -Guy. She presented it to me as a token gift for losing over 25 pounds over a period of several months. The XBG inscription has long worn off, but the coffee still tastes great.
