On our plot in Fairleads (between Rynfield and Petit) we had 45mm of rain recently, and then on a Friday night we had another 34mm of steady, but gentle rainfall.
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The next day, it rained pretty heavily for most of the day.
I read and emptied our rain gauge in the late afternoon – it read 62mm.
That made 96mm so far and it was still raining.
On the Sunday morning early the rain gauge showed that we had had a further 9mm overnight.
It was a cool and cloudy day.
However on Monday morning, the rain gauge showed that a further 11mm had fallen overnight, and the sky slowly but surely started to clear.
This brought our grand total for this bout of rain to 116mm.
116mm equals 11.6cm; that gives some idea of the volume of water that fell, because 11.6cm is nearly the length of a ballpoint pen.
So if one had an empty bucket with vertical sides standing out in the open, after the rain it would have had water in it to the depth of a ballpoint pen. If we take a m2 of any area out of doors, the amount of rain that fell on it would be 100 by 100 by 11.6cm³, which comes to 116 000cm³.
As there are 1 000cm3 in a litre, we are talking here about 116l of water – on one m2.
Now let’s see how much that would be in total on a one hectare plot.
One hectare is equal to 100m by 100m, which comes to 10 000m2.
So if these 10 000m2 get 116l of water each, that comes to 1 160 000l.
Let’s round that down to a million.
How much water is that?
The average home swimming pool contains 50 000l of water, and 1 000 000 divided by 50 000 is equal 20.
So we’re looking at having 20 swimming pools full of water sprinkled fairly slowly on a plot of ground.
And on a suburban stand?
One hectare is approximately three acres, so that is equivalent to six half-acre stands.
Therefore each one of these six stands would receive 1 000 000 divided by six, which comes to 166 666l or 3.3 swimming pools full.
In spite of this, we are not yet at the run-off stage of things.
With a bit of help from the universal force of gravity, the water slowly seeps into the ground and the weight of more water falling on top of it pushed it in more, and at the end of the day the water reaches the roots of the biggest of trees and raises the water table in the area.
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