Thank you for your comments, Akira, Thomas and Erik.
Akira - unfortunately I am not yet able to walk on water, but I'm waiting for the day to arrive. I was standing on a former railway bridge which crosses the much-swollen River Lochay. The water-level is about 2m above average, and 3m above a typical (summer) low point.
In Scotland, statistically, May/June and September are the driest months, and the months with the most "good" weather. But statistics relate to the past, and atmospheric warming is happening now . . . . this is why we are going to start each day in May witha 30-minute Quechua Indian rain-dance - performed backwards, of course, since we want it NOT to rain, and the dance is normally used to BRING rain.
I sometimes like to do a little mental arithmetic, and this was this morning's exercise - in normal times, this river is about 60m wide, with an average depth of 2m, and it flows at about 1.5m/sec. Since 1 cubic metre weighs one metric ton, the weight of water flowing down that river to the sea is -
60 x 2 x 1.5 (tons per second) x 60 (t/min) x 60 (t/hour) x 24 (t/day) x 365 (tons per year) = nearly 500 million metric tons. Ain't that a surprise? Even if my initial assumptions are wrong by a factor of three, that still means that nearly 200 million tons of water flow down that river every year.
