Abstract
I HAVE read Mr. Sellick's letter about the rainfall of Southern Rhodesia with great interest. It was certainly not my intention to revive a theory of the origin of Rhodesian rainfall that has been disproved. My source of information was Kendrew's “Climates of the Continents” (1922). Kendrew makes a statement (p. 72 of that work) that implies that the monsoonal indraught in the South African summer is fed by the south-east trades, for he refers the moisture to evaporation over the South Indian Ocean. The case against this, it appears, rests upon a consideration of the trajectories of the inflowing air streams and not on the geographical distribution of the normal summer rainfall, for the ordinary diminution of rainfall (after elimination of the orographical factor) with distance from the coast would presumably be shown, whether the indraught were an eddy in the south-east trades or an eddy in a north-west current representing deflected north-east trades that have crossed the equator. Kendrew admits that in summer the north-east trades reach the north-west of Madagascar as north-west winds. The extended charts referred to by Mr. Sellick evidently show that these are then drawn into Southern Rhodesia during the monsoon. It is hoped that this important fact will be mentioned in future works on climatology.
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N., E. Climate of Southern Rhodesia. Nature 130, 26 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130026a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130026a0
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