That is about as counterintuitive as it gets.
From Discovery:
Drier Soils May Spur Rain
Drier soils are more likely to trigger storms than nearby wetter soils, a surprising new study finds.
These findings suggest global weather and climate models — which assume that dry soils mean dry weather — might currently be simulating an excessive number of droughts, the scientists behind the study said.
An international research team analyzed imagery from weather satellites that track storm clouds as they develop across the globe. When they matched up where new storms appeared on every continent save Antarctica alongside images of how wet the ground was, they discovered, to their surprise, that afternoon storms are more likely to rain down on parched soils....MUCH MOREThe European and Yankee settlers heading west of the Mississippi were lured in part by the notion that "Rain follows the plow". Their mistake was in confusing weather for climate. The reality was a bit different. From our June 2010 post "Why we bailed on First Solar and Sunpower: "Stocks Tumble as Technical Markers Give Way" (FSLR; SPWRA; SPWRB)":
Here's one of the sharpest credit analysts, James Grant, combining some climate history with economics "red in tooth and claw".*
...Significantly, such cycles have
occurred in every institutional, monetary and regulatory setting. No
need for a central bank or for the proliferation of hedge funds to
foment a panic - there have been plenty of dislocations without any of
the modern-day improvements.
Late
in the 1880s, long before the institution of the Federal Reserve,
Eastern savers and Western borrowers teamed up to inflate the value of
cropland in America's Great Plains. Gimmicky mortgages and loose talk of
a new era in rainfall beguiled the borrowers. High yields on Western
mortgages enticed the lenders.
But the climate of Kansas and Nebraska
reverted to parched, and the drought-stricken debtors trudged back East
or to the West Coast in wagons emblazoned, "In God we trusted, in Kansas
we busted." To the creditors went the farms.
*Life in the west as always been precarious and brings to mind some scribblings:
Fifty-sixth stanza of Tennyson's "In Memoriam":
Man her last work, who seem'd so fair,There was a reason the area the rivers to the Rockies was called the Great American Desert. Here's explorer Stephen Long in 1820:
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law -
Tho' nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed -
The region between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course inhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.Meanwhile The Australian (not a Murdoch property) looks at the implications for climate models:
Research questions 'worse drought' warnings
Afternoon storms are more
likely to develop when soils are parched, according to a new study
published this week in Nature which examined hydrological processes
across six continents.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-drier-soils-trigger-storms.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-drier-soils-trigger-storms.html#jCp
Afternoon storms are more
likely to develop when soils are parched, according to a new study
published this week in Nature which examined hydrological processes
across six continents.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-drier-soils-trigger-storms.html#jCp
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-drier-soils-trigger-storms.html#jCp
