This is what I get for complaining about the searing summer heat over the weekend: A Monday of torrential summer rain.

We’ve had an impressive display of window-rattling thunder and showy mountain lightning over the past twelve hours, and the kind of non-stop, utterly vertical precipitation that is actually a warm joy to dance in if you aren’t trying to revive your electrical power or to keep the garage from flooding.

For the moment, fingers crossed, we’ve got power and the flooding has been averted, so I found myself thinking about where all this precious sweet fresh water might go. We have a couple of water cisterns for our roof run-off – we use it to water the plants when the inevitable summer drought conditions set in. But whither the rest of this watery plenty?

Drawing Water (2011)
Infographic: David Wicks / sansumbrella

I couldn’t find information for France, but I did find this intriguing image of water flow in the United States. Called Drawing Water and created by David Wicks, it illustrates the relation between where water falls to where it is consumed, based on government data. From Wicks’ site, sansumbrella:

“Each line in Drawing Water corresponds to a daily rainfall measurement. The length of the line and its initial placement are determined by the amount of rainfall measured and where it fell. The final placement and color of each line are determined by the influence of urban water consumers. The more water a city uses, the stronger its pull on the rainfall.”

It’s worth heading over to sansumbrella to play with the interactive links for this illustration and read the more extensive descriptions of how the image was created.

Meanwhile, I will listen to the steady millions of drops falling outside, picture their onward journey across, through and under the ground, and learn to complain neither about the heat, nor about the rain. Because, for the moment, the water table where I live has plenty of water from which to draw.