Temperate Rain Forest
The average yearly rainfall at Gorges State Park is over 80 inches (2032 mm) creating a temperate rain forest. The rainfall is a result of orographic lift which occurs when an air mass is forced from a low elevation to a higher elevation as it moves over rising terrain. The land at Gorges State Park rises over 2,000 feet (609 m) in just 4 miles (6.43 km). As the air mass gains altitude it expands and cools adiabatically. This cooler air cannot hold the moisture as well as warm air can, which effectively raises the relative humidity to 100%, creating clouds and frequent precipitation.
Read more about this topic: Gorges State Park
Famous quotes containing the words temperate, rain and/or forest:
“No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 38:28.
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)