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 anybody been to both Perth and Los Angeles? 
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Joined: Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:01 pm
Posts: 412
Location: Maryland, USA
Post anybody been to both Perth and Los Angeles?
Wonder how the climates seem to compare to visitors. They both have very similar temperatures throughout the year, and high 3200 hours of sunshine, > x2 as much as London. LA is a little cooler at night, especially towards the coast because of the California current: 15.3C at night in high summer in Santa Barbara, versus 17.8C in the coastal suburbs of Perth. Summer rain storms can rarely occur in Perth, even though their overall pattern of rainfall is also Mediterranean. The interesting thing to me is Perth's YOY rainfall is slightly more than double at 33 inches/840mm. To the degree one can guess at the native vegetation in such a built-up area*, it seems that in the LA area the "natural vegetation" below about 360m/1200 ft. is chaparral. Scrub and low herbaceous plants, the few trees are quite stunted looking by drought. I'm sure I didn't drive as high in the coastal mountains as I could have, but my impression was the trees get bigger and less sparse as the elevation goes up, because of orographic precipitation.

What I wonder is whether the Perth countryside seems to have many taller, more luxuriant looking trees because of this higher rainfall, or would other factors like fire act as balancing forces? Google images isn't terribly helpful in terms of giving an impression of what natural scenery in that area would look like:
https://www.google.com/search?q=midgego ... ional+park
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yanch ... Park_8.jpg
(this looks too cultivated)
This page is a bit helpful:
http://ljhookermandurah.wordpress.com/2 ... -the-bike/

* - but this very mystery is part of the strange charm of LA. The natural environment has been so completely subsumed, and yet seems so untameable. There's just some stark quality to this mega-suburban city that sprawls along 2 100 miles axes, but against a backdrop of the 8000' San Gabriel mountains. In the east, no geographical feature is there to limn the contrast between man and nature so succinctly. It's hard to explain I suppose, unless one had long had a mental image of southern California in one's mind, opinion of its historical level of water use, and finally visited there in mid-life. There are some large natural looking trees in Laurel Canyon, for example. Are they really larger because the canyon funnels water down from the mountain, or have they just been watered since the 1930s?


Fri Oct 12, 2012 11:26 am
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Joined: Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:58 am
Posts: 1099
Post Re: anybody been to both Perth and Los Angeles?
I've been to LA but not Perth, so I can only speculate what's there.
There's no doubt the karri forests in the south-west corner are impressive, but they are further south than Perth and have a cooler, wetter climate. The Darling Ranges east of Perth are also wetter than the city, I believe, and probably more luxuriant.


Sat Oct 13, 2012 1:09 pm
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