Maybe you have been as fortunate as we and had a good rain or perhaps a thunderstorm today. We’ve been surviving a heat wave with triple digit highs for a couple of weeks. I try to not water the lawn in order to conserve water; it hasn’t rained in weeks. Yesterday, I ran the sprinkler in the backyard; part of it looks like an arid Savannah.
Today, it rained. It was an inconsequential sprinkle at first. Then, after an hour or so, the lightning and thunder arrived. “Thor and Mjöllnir,” I thought. I walked out onto the back porch and made these little recordings.
We got a steady downpour for about an hour. Now, the air smells fresh, the temperature has dropped a good 15F degrees, and I bet that much of the Saharan dust plume in our area’s upper atmosphere has come down with the rain droplets. Dust particles in the upper atmosphere serve as nucleation sites for condensation. The dust brings the rains, as it were.
When the clouds clear, the night sky should be more transparent than before.