BY JOHN HOPKINS
The Cincinnati Enquirer
For as long as there have been baseball mitts, bikes and Little League, there have been disappointed children who watched from windowsills as rain spoiled another weekend.
A new rainfall study of East Coast weather patterns and an Enquirer review of Tristate rainfall patterns going back five years confirms what those children at the windowsills knew all along: It really does rain more frequently on the weekend.
The Enquirer review showed significantly more rain on Saturdays and Sundays than during the week, backing up an analysis of Eastern Seaboard weather by Arizona State University that shows Saturdays receive an average of 22 percent more precipitation than Mondays. Felix Moore, coach of the Avondale Warriors' Little League team, knew this to be true long before the Arizona State climatologists released their report.
"It doesn't surprise me at all," said Mr. Moore, "because for the last two years it has rained tremendously over the weekends. For the last two years our games have been canceled out, and they're almost impossible to make them up."
The rain clouds are, to some extent, the product of the very jobs people are trying to escape on weekends, according to the Arizona State study, published earlier this month in Nature magazine. The ASU researchers, who analyzed weather data dating back to 1946, said weekend storms probably are enhanced by air pollution spewed by millions of cars and trucks during weekday commutes. The pollution generates tons of tiny airborne particles, called aerosols, that become the microscopic seeds around which rain drops develop. The ASU study found that weekly pollution highs and lows match the weekly precipitation cycle, with pollution peaking by Saturday and dipping noticeably by Monday.
The Enquirer's review of rainfall patterns in the Tristate since 1993 shows Tuesdays and Fridays received the least rain. But when the weekend arrived, precipitation numbers jumped. Saturday and Sunday received up to 26 percent more rain than other days during the week.
Nonetheless, there are some who would like to see more evidence and a stronger cause-and-effect relationship between pollution, rainfall and weekends.
"We could just be looking at a statistical fluke," said Jeffrey Rogers, a member of the geography department at Ohio State University. "I'm a little skeptical about this."
An earlier study in France concluded just the opposite -- that it rained less during the weekends, Mr. Rogers said. "It's a striking correlation," said David Parrish, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "But I'm not sure that the connection to the pollution is entirely clear to me."
But no study knows what a Little League player knows about the weekend weather. And no one wants to be in the shoes of Coach Moore on a rainy Saturday morning when a game must be canceled.
"We have to go down a complete list of players' names and call each parent and let them know. It's a task. It really is.
"And it's bad. The kids will say, "You sure we can't play on the field? ' They get to the point where they want to play on the muddy fields."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
