Un-Ozark Rain

It's been raining here all day, which is a welcome relief from the drought we've been suffering under. I absolutely love days like today, when it just keeps up a steady drizzle all day long. In fact, that's one of the things that I've always missed since moving to Northwest Arkansas. Where I'm from, down in central and south Arkansas, it's pretty typical for a rainstorm to roll up from Texas or the Gulf and hang around for as long as three days. Up here in the mountains, though, it seems that we usually catch storm lines that just finished sprinting across Oklahoma, so although we still usually get a lot of rain, it tends to be in short, intense bursts.

During a storm spotter course, I once heard one of the local TV weather guys explain that the Boston Mountains, between Fayetteville and Fort Smith, more or less mark the dividing line between Gulf Coastal and Great Plains weather systems. Since we're sitting right on the border, which patterns we experience are determined by the interplay between the jet stream and subtropical gulf blah blah blah something something...meteorology isn't really my thing.

What it boils down to is that sometimes Northwest Arkansas is like southern Arkansas and sometimes it's like northern Missouri. Today was a south Arkansas day, and I was grateful for a little homestyle weather!