Rain comes from the ground not the sky, Fukuoka

      I have been whatching the video on you tube, Fukuoka in greece in which he says that rain comes from the earth not the sky and i thought that would be a good title for a thread here on these forums.
  He says what bill mollison says that spores bring rain. I have to cheque that one out in bill mollisons videos and fukuolas. In biology i learnt that rain forms round a mote of dust and i  have photos of cars heavily coverd in fine san dafter the rain in Madrid, you can tell its earth it is  s andy colored or reddish earth colored, so spores or a mote of dust. I have always, it seems to me, heard that trees bring rain, I have made up my own reasons for this. I throw the theme out here for others to stuff their own bits of fact or comment into it. agri rose macaskie.

Rain falls from the sky.  It doesn't come from anywhere.  It's a cycle.  It's the chicken and the egg.

Its a cycle but if people think Rain ocmes from the sky as in is bought by winds and such and do not consider the importance of what they do on earth as effecting the rain we recieve fwe are more likely to increase desertification.
    I have always heard that if you have trees you get more rain fall for example, that is what you have on the ground effecting the rain fall. I have even heard that rainfall increases in an area if ther is a pretty small area of trees.
        It is important to as far as taking water from a wet place to a dry place to is concerned, if you make a wet place drier you might have less rainfall in the wet place as what happens on the ground effects the rainfall and then you have two dry places when all you mean tto do was to help a set of people living in a dry place.
    I wrote to nasa about desertification and a member of their gteam was kind enough to wrrite back to me. She said that drying the swamps in florida had lowered rain fall there for example.

    In many situations what matters is being able to present tha people take in aand turning the idea that rain comes from the sky round, turning round the idea that what matters are cold and hot fronts meeting and such, the winds which is true but denies the importance of our use of the ground below to effect rainfall, with a suprising statement, a catchy term is useful if you are fighting the growing desertification in the world. rose macaskie.

Hello Rose and All.

At minute 15 of this video, Willie Smit explains about the rain forest rain cycle.   The video as a whole is very interesting if you have not seen it.   It was my one my first exposures to the concepts of permaculture.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

Sepp Holzer says in one of his German Videos that
neglected dried out soil
does not attract moisture,
because when it rains you get only floods and flooding and nothing soaks into the soil;

that's why he says he keeps all these different ponds, about 75 of them,
to keep his ground in moisture that soaks in any rain...

Wood in the huegelbed is another rain attractor;

and  rocks you see everywhere are micro climates that store warmth converted  from sunrays
around which he plants his tropical plants, kiwi etc....

  I did not know sepp Holzer had seventy ponds. He has so much energy he seems to me like the picasso of the permaculture woorld picasso did so many paintings and was so full of ideas and sepp holzer too does everything in great mumbers. . If you got floods and floding that ran off the land it would leave the place dry again aand reduce the possibility of the air getting to the saturation point and it raining.

      I have been thinking about what stalk_of_ fennel says and i have thought that maybe it would be more accurate to to change my title which is to say  fukuoka's saying  to "It is the earth not the sky that brings the moisture in the air to condensation point", though it would be a tremendous exageration as the humidity in the air condenses when cold bits of air meet warmer ones as well as for reasons that seem to have a lot to do with the earth to judge from changing rainfall paterns when we change the vegetation on the ground.
    Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air so if ithe warm air is pretty saturated with moisture and it meets a cold front that cools it down, the moisture in it may be enough to condense into rain drops, which must be considered sky infllluenced rainfall.

      I have thought maybe if the air near the ground is more humid because of trees or ponds and lakes or water asaturated soil and air comes by which is pretty close to having its humidity condense into rain then the humidity in the air is more likely to reach that piont  of condensing in a humid place than it would be if it arrived at a very dry place that dried the newly arriving breezes. Hope that is understandable. I have no idea if it is true it is a conjecture of mine.  rose macaskie.

rose macaskie wrote:
I have been thinking about what stalk_of_ fennel says and i have thought that maybe it would be more accurate to to change my title which is to say  fukuoka's saying  to "It is the earth not the sky that brings the moisture in the air to condensation point", though it would be a tremendous exageration as the humidity in the air condenses when cold bits of air meet warmer ones as well as for reasons that seem to have a lot to do with the earth to judge from changing rainfall paterns when we change the vegetation on the ground.
    Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air so if ithe warm air is pretty saturated with moisture and it meets a cold front that cools it down, the moisture in it may be enough to condense into rain drops, which must be considered sky infllluenced rainfall

Well yes, but according to my met class ( I have studied so many random things), nil condensation occurs regardless of the saturation of the media, unless there is a nucleus for it to condense to. That nucleus is often dust of varying sizes, or particulate pollutants.
Once a little ice or rain has condensed to a nucleus, more water vapour can condense to the existing droplet.
It is only once the droplets have grown large and heavy enough to exceed the amount the local air currents can support that precipitation occurs
If there is a lack of suitable particles to become nuclei, then no condensation, no precipitation. One should note however that this is a wide area effect, and unless there is an atmospheric inversion any wood fire, car engine or dust generating surface is going to start the process.
( for ice btw, I seem to recall that it needs to find Two nuclei, one to condense to, and one to freeze to. This is one reason why freezing-rain happens. The air in which the rain is occurring is warmer than freezing, but the raindrops are falling into a region of air cooler than the freezing temperature, Thus supercooled, they freeze to the first available object that provides the requirement for a freezing nucleus  )
( Also note that this is entirely from memory and I have not consulted my met texts in a few years)

  Aganippe that is the information i did not have. rose.

where I live a lot of rain comes from the WIND..

we live in an area where the wind blows across the big lakes of the great lakes and the wind picks up the moisture and drops it as snow or rain inland about 30 to 100 miles..depending on the wind speed.

in winter they call it Lake Effect Snow and that gives us a lot of snow when the great lakes are not frozen..which they are not yet..some years they never freeze over and we get lake effect snow all winter long..

we also get lake effect rain, but generally it happens when it is really cold..near freezing and we get the strong NW winds out of Canada blowing the lakes up and over the land dropping it on our property..

I know that this probably happens on the downwind side of oceans and other bodies of water too, but here it is quite unique to the great lakes that the downwind sides get 2 to 3 to 10 x more snow than the upwind areas..

rose macaskie wrote:
      I have been whatching the video on you tube, Fukuoka in greece in which he says that rain comes from the earth not the sky and i thought that would be a good title for a thread here on these forums.
  He says what bill mollison says that spores bring rain. I have to cheque that one out in bill mollisons videos and fukuolas. In biology i learnt that rain forms round a mote of dust and i  have photos of cars heavily coverd in fine san dafter the rain in Madrid, you can tell its earth it is  s andy colored or reddish earth colored, so spores or a mote of dust. I have always, it seems to me, heard that trees bring rain, I have made up my own reasons for this. I throw the theme out here for others to stuff their own bits of fact or comment into it. agri rose macaskie.

Plants make rain in a million ways.

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0401-hance_revolutionarytheory.html
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/02/29/2176219.htm

Not my links, from my friend Michaelangelica in another forum.

Rain follows the plow, or so they told the people they were trying to sell land in Oklahoma and Texas. Then the dust bowl set in, and it got even drier and there was more dust and particulates - that didn't help.

Particulates can seed a cloud, but only when there is moisture in the air and other conditions are right. It is slightly more rainy down-wind of big cities than up wind, and around cities, rain is slightly more likely in the later part of the week (after particulates build up from industry) than on Saturday/Sunday/Monday, when the factories shut down and the air quality improves.

Jonathon byron. Its interesting about the wind and cities it proves th eimportance of particles.
  i think hte dust bowl must have been like it was clouds of fine black dust so thick that blocked out the sun and got into peoples clothes because there was a big pile up of humic matter dust in th es oils that had never before been ploughed.
  THe first earth to get taken off by the wind is that which is formed from organic mateter taht is lighter than stone particles and the finer mineral particles all the parts of the soil that are best at holding water. the rector or the agronomy division at madrid university told me that who is a specialist in citric fruits. I used to be into ringing up pppeople and asking htem questions as part of a effort to be brave.
 
    Maikeru's link is incredible, i wanted to give myself a little bit of time to understand it before talking about it but events have carried me away and i have not said anything for ages .
    maikerus link claims that plants act as pumps because as they are humidifiers and humidity causes low pressure, and as winds all blow from high to low, the low pressure that plants and trees create brings the winds from the sea inland.
    That is why Brasil is wet when normally the interior of continents are dry and that is why a desert appeared in Australia when man arrived and deforested it, they took away the plants whose humidity  bought about the drop in pressure that drew the sea breazes inland. It says that if we plant bands of plants leading inland to the interior of ocntinents we will get the water ladened air from the seas coming inland again. It is  a message of hope ..
      I hope that i have understood that right i am not very confident about my understanding of air pressures and winds.
    So rain comes from th eground it is so influenced by the vegetation on th eground.
      I have always heard that trees bring rain but i think that if you can explain it so people can understand and  believe it, we are all  more likely to act on it. I think people are given to deciding for themselves, so it is best to convince them properly instead of just telling them what to do. agri rose macaskie.

I think there is still something more we are missing.  I read about Vicktor Schaubergers work and how when he found a spring that had stopped because people cut down vegetation he built a building over it and replanted the area.  The spring came back quickly. (quick synopsis).

Then again, the amount of moisture here next to my old growth stand is incredible.  It continues to rain some 45 minutes  more after any storm has passed inside that stand.  Its incredible.

I like this: "the trees calls the rain." Intuitively, this feels right. The woods always feels wetter than the meadows. I think there is something to keeping the language of expressing this light and quick.

Pakanohida wrote:
I think there is still something more we are missing.  I read about Vicktor Schaubergers work and how when he found a spring that had stopped because people cut down vegetation he built a building over it and replanted the area.  The spring came back quickly. (quick synopsis).

Clearly, if the land cover is poor and rainfall quickly runs off, then streams are subject to more flash flooding, and streams and springs will later go dry more often.  Forests, swales, and other landscaping can make better use of the available water - the extremes in the hydrologic cycle are smoothed out. 

Pakanohida wrote:
Then again, the amount of moisture here next to my old growth stand is incredible.  It continues to rain some 45 minutes  more after any storm has passed inside that stand.  Its incredible.

Continues to rain? As in the leaves continue to drip? Sure, and that can help more water infiltrate into the soil, replenishes streams, less water runs off immediately.

Some coastal forests can harvest dew - another case of where vegetation can actually influence the micro-climate.

 WHat pakonihid says is wha ti keep hearing from people and from the peace prize winner Wangari Matthai in reports of what she says and in her book and pakonihida here. still i would like to explain it, i think that some people believe things if yoiu say them and others believe them if you give a convincing explaination of them and we want everyone to believe them as it is a question of our survuval or of saving people who live near the deserts which are increasing.
Here they tend to clean all vegetation away from streams so if it is true that trees around rivers keep them running it needs to be understood here.
 I critise Spain for over grazing and over clearing but the truth is also that they still have many of the strong natural trees like junipers that we lost years ago in britain and if you want to see natural pastures full of flowers and a wide variety of plants you only have to go on holiday to tamajon in ht emountains of guadqljara  the pastoral sid eof things here is interesting though they do increase desertificatiuiuon so as a reserve of information on past and probably healthy feeding methods if only htey were not so sparsely grown  good but for africa considering  th t a desert like a burn you cure from the edges their laying bare of land makes them unhelpfull for desertificaiton in africa and a makes them a burden on the ecology of the world. though i am glasd to have had the experience of natural pastures and juniper woods. rose macaskie.

Paul's presentation on Replacing Irrigation with Permaculture at the Inland Northwest Permaculture Convergence: http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/508-podcast-087-replacing-irrigation-with-permaculture/

Saw an article in Science News back in the print days, and they discussed the "drying" of the west as an effect of the shipping of containers carving up the old , floating kelp beds that USED to be out there in the pacific. Was it where the plastic vortex is now?

They had a satt photo of ships wakes, with cloud formation above them. The theory was that the kelp were wafting up bio cores on warm air currents they themselves created, allowing atmospheric seeding. This really increased atmospheric moisture levels, allowing more rain to get inland in the old days.

Think those old kelp beds are long gone......

There was also a decade where 1,000's of tons of kelp were harvested for export to the Far East.  Hugh vessels with "lawn mowers" towed behind, chopping and collecting.  The industry died once the kelp beds had been destroyed.

     We have seen huge kelp losses in areas where it was not harvested. The number one destroyer of kelp is the sea urchin. Sea otters are the primary predator of this species. They were largely hunted out for their pelts at one time and urchins soon had a population explosion which served to completely annihilate many kelp forests.

    On Vancouver Island we have seen a resurgence in otter populations and kelp beds are expanding.   I had the pleasure of working on a property which had become home to sea otters during foul weather. The house had been abandoned so they moved right in durinng storms.They made an awful mess but were fun to watch.