Rain Shadow

For those of you who clicked over expecting a post about Storm Shadow's little brother, I apologize and welcome to my blog.  Odds are you've never been here before.  It's not that I'm above GI Joe, far from it, but as unfocused as this series may seem from time to time, I do attempt to remain on the topic of building worlds of words.  GI Joe actually demonstrates two of the basic tropes of fantasy exhausted during my childhood 

1) A team-up of disparate types of people who join together to defeat the big bad.

2) The outsider (Snake Eyes) taken in and taught the secret fighting arts of some highly select group for no good reason, but for the fact it makes a cool story.

However, as I said, this is not a GI Joe post, so I'll stick to science and if you want to discuss the Joes, you can do it in the comments section or some other corner of the internet.  Ahem...

from the wiki

"Rain shadow" is term used to describe a meteorologic effect (orographic lift) which explains why you can have lush greenery on one side of the mountains and a desert on the other.  These rain shadows are formed in the lee (prevailing winds come from the other side) of mountain ranges.  When warm moist air is forced upwards by the face of the mountain range, the cooler temperatures and reduced atmospheric pressure forms clouds. These clouds drop rain and snow on that face.  Once it goes over the mountains or through the passes, the clouds (having spent much of their moisture) descend to the warmer layers of the atmosphere and dissipate.  Such is the case with in Death Valley (Sierra Madres and Pacific Coast Range), the Atacama Desert (Andes) and the Tibetan Plateau (Himalayas).   
    You may ask why I bring this up.  The basic point is that the rain shadow effect is not uncommon.  Mountains are barriers to more than just human passage.  The higher and more extensive the mountain range, the more pronounced the effect.  Rain shadows don't just produce deserts, they can form grasslands, scrub-lands or any other kind of semi-arid region.  They also come into play on islands.  Wiki has loads of examples.
    All I'm saying is that I don't know how many times I've read a story in which one side of an impenetrable mountain range looks much like the other.  Not that this can't happen, just that I'm always impressed by writers who can fully realize their natural worlds.  It is these interactions of the natural environment that create the varied terrains which compel so much human variation (or that of other Fantastic creatures).  By learning more about how the environment interacts with itself, we can make our worlds more believable and help to inspire our own creations.





Net Sources
NatGeo - http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/rain-shadow/?ar_a=1#
Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow
Pacific NW - http://www.olympicrainshadow.com/rainshadoweffect.html