“Valley of Saunas and Scorchmarks”
Arguably the Cerulean Storm basically is that - I think its water source is from Elemental Water. But even though it covers the same area, it may not be on a comparable scale of effect.
Or rather, it probably shouldn’t be, or the implications would be enormous.
The Valley of Dust and Fire/Cerulean Storm is not that far from the Tablelands; if it’s as dramatic an effect to the global water balance as a Valley of Dust and Fire sized lava sea would be to the global heat balance, the regional effect would be overwhelming - the Tablelands would probably stop being a desert in fairly short order.
Sure the rain boils away, but it still becomes water vapor in the atmosphere, it’s not leaving the system entirely.
So unless we want a very radical environmental change pretty shortly after the revised setting, I think the Cerulean Storm has to be far smaller scale. Most of the rain is probably recycling within the Storm (turning to steam, falling as rain, turning to steam again, falling as rain again, etc.) rather than exiting the area… so the rate of water input to Athas may be small.
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Which might be true of the Cerulean Storm itself, but consider the Tyr-Storms. They get spun out into the larger world, dropping tons of water onto the land every day they’re out, and there are several each year.
They may wreck anything they hit, but there’s also a lot of nothing out there… nothing where you’ve just dropped a bunch of flash floods.
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The Tyr-storms do provide rain outside the area, but the revised box set makes it sound like they don’t provide really that much water - not enough to change the overall climate of the Tablelands.
So only a tiny fraction of the water must ‘escape’ in Tyr-storms; it’s got to nearly all recycle. Constant heavy, driving rains over an area the size of the Valley of Dust and Fire would be producing a large lake’s worth of water every day if it was all newly-added-to-the-system water. The whole Sea of Silt would be mudflats pretty fast.
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TBH, I wonder if the people who wrote up Tyr-Storms didn’t know thunderstorms.
Even if they travel with minimal loss and only “burst” on a certain location, you’re throwing a LOT of water across the landscape. Even then, a hard rain, something dropping 2-6" of water a year on a place that usually less than an inch is going to be a lot.
I looked it up, briefly. What Is Heavy Rain? Here's How Much Can Fall In One Hour | Weather.com
Weather Channel says that .3 inches an hour is classed as a heavy rain. Harvey dropped 6.8 inches in an hour on SE Houston; I was in SW Houston for that, and watched the water climb up the incline in my MIL’s yard.
Cairo see 24.8mm in a year… a hair under an inch of rain. Phoenix sees 183mm… about 7 inches. Since Tyr storms last 20 minutes - 1 hour, at the low end, a heavy rain is .1 inch (.3/hour, 20 minutes) to 6.8 inches. A weak heavy rain isn’t much… a Tyr Storm, which is supposed to have enough wind and rain to wreck a chunk of a city, might be looking at closer to 2-7 inches of rain, all at once.
That’s a lot of water to throw into a system, even as it spreads across the landscape.
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Yeah, a few inches can cause flooding in a dry desert. And Tyr-storms do: the first Tyr-storm that hit Draj led to significant flooding, with crops being destroyed and some deaths.
But Wanderer’s Chronicle p. 7 says that “Even with the advent of the deadly Tyr-storms, actual rainfall has increased only slightly across the land.”
I think the idea is that any particular spot isn’t hit very often, and they’re relatively small area coverage. They’re “small, concentrated downpours”, and “No Tyr-storm lasts more than an hour, and most dissipate within 20 minutes of the first raindrops striking the ground.”
So even if the rain rate inside the Tyr-storm is huge, say 3 inches/hour, that’s only 1-3 inches overall over a 20 min - 1 hour storm; and the area covered may not be very large. So the total amount of water may be small.
It might double or even triple the amount of rain the Tablelands got before the Cerulean Storm, but that’s not nearly enough to get them out of a desert climate regime. It might become more like the desert of the heavily-monsoon-affected part of Arizona, but still definitely desert.
Over a time span longer than we’ve seen, it probably will change things. But subtler changes, different desert flora thriving in certain areas (short lifespan plants that grow rapidly after rain), etc.
If all the water in the Cerulean Storm was “new input” though rather than cycling within the storm … that’s when things would get crazy.
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I wonder if the “storm”, being unnatural, never lets go of most of its water? If the water drops, flows around a bit, and is then all picked back up by the storm, that would create storm like effects and damage, but would only add slightly to the overall water levels. What is it was made of heavy water? Or has mercury like qualities?
In the California-desert, there’s these cinder-cones that blacken miles of desert with lava-flows. Examples are Amboy Crater and Piscah. They are surreal and I’d like to create a map with them one day.
They are also a good source of obsidian.
Yes, exactly, I think the water has to nearly all cycle within the storm itself that way.