It was raining again this weekend in Santiago, waves of downpour fading into steady drizzle before the raindrops started pounding down hard once more, echoing loudly on the metal railing of the balcony. The streets outside my house were almost abandoned, and public buses came with half their normal frequency, leaving people waiting at the stops in the rain for over half an hour at a time. Last week, we had so much rain that parts of the city actually flooded, and my host mom told us that the stormy weather is going to continue for the rest of the winter, although it never actually snows here in the city.
This might sound like a terrible thing, but the rain can actually help with one of Santiago's biggest winter problems: air pollution. As the weather grows colder, more people use their cars to travel in the city, and many businesses and homes turn up the heat, leading to even more pollution from all the car exhaust and smoke released into the atmosphere. Even in the summer, Santiago is usually blanketed with a layer of smog thick enough that it can be hard to see the Andes mountains, even though they are huge and right next to the city. In the winter, that smog becomes even thicker. However, after the rain this week, we could see the mountains clearly, right up to the snow on their peaks. How does that work?
