I noticed what Mike noticed for the two slightly different summer rainfall patterns back when I was fooling around and made some annual rainfall graphs of a number of different mediterranean climate region cities around the world. Mary Sue loaded them onto the PBS wiki way back when. The comparison graph can be found at: <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/files/…> and since it gets kind of crowded at the middle of the summer dry period, those cities that got more than 1/2 inch or 10 mm of rain during the driest month are marked. The French and Italian Mediterranean also had an unusual autumn rainfall peak in October rather than midwinter like all the other locations. I made a few other graphs for comparison and contrast that you can also find on the wiki at: <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…> --Lee Poulsen Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a Michael Mace wrote: > --Los Angeles, CA and Perth, Australia have almost identical temperature > profiles (offset by six months). But Perth gets a lot more rain in winter, > and even its summers average half an inch (1.3 cm) of rain a month. In > contrast, LA has five months in summer that average less than 0.3 inches > (0.75cm) of rain per month. > > --Valparaiso, Chile is an eerily close match for San Francisco, CA. San > Francisco is a little bit wetter. > > --I think there are two different types of Mediterranean climate areas. > What I'll call "Moist Mediterranean" includes South Africa, Western and > South Australia, and southern France/Italy/Greece. They all get a bit of > summer rainfall. "Dry Mediterranean" includes California, Chile, and parts > of the Middle East (Beirut and Tel Aviv, for example). They all have long > periods of virtually no rain in summer. > > > The implication to me is that if I'm growing South African or Australian > plants, I may need to give them a little bit of summer water. > > >