okay so first things first we got to define what exactly a rainforest is the only problem is that like virtually every other concept in ecology rainforests are made up in reality forests will grow wherever there's enough water in circulation but also far beyond this threshold leaving some forests on the drier end of things and others far wetter where exactly we draw the line between what's considered a forest and what's considered just a regular forest is completely arbitrary so to get a better sense of how much rain true rainforests really receive we can take a look at an average global precipitation map and find some of the most well-known examples like the amazon to use as a metric here we can see the amazon of today occupies five and a half million square kilometers of south america roughly coinciding with this orange to red layer signifying around NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters of rain per year though the deeper into the forest we look rainfall peaks in these purples to even light yellow areas signifying upwards of NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters of water per year in some spots but i think it's safe to say the amazon is a bit of an anomaly here more than anything what this map shows us is just how water-rich this region is and explains why the amazon river discharges more water than any other river on earth and by a wide margin so if this is what we use to judge all other rainforests by then everything will simply pale in comparison even moving on to the river with the second highest discharge the congo river looking at the actual rainfall levels that feed it shows us a significantly drier environment despite hosting what's widely considered to be the second largest rainforest on the planet this area falls mostly within this red to pink color range between NUMBER_TOKEN to NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters of rain per year and overall the congo rainforest appears to offer a more realistic metric for judging other rainforests against but okay just to be sure the third greatest river by discharge is the ganges bringing us to the third and final major rainforest on earth the south east asian rainforest here we can see the historic size of this forest sits within a similar range of anywhere above NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters though with peaks at upwards of NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters of rain annually in some places what this all shows us is that places we can all agree to be legitimate big rain forests tend to correspond with areas that receive any more than NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters or NUMBER_TOKEN inches of precipitation per year isolating this color range on our map we'll see that these degrees of rainfall are concentrated mostly within the tropical areas of the globe giving rise to the world famous tropical rainforests as well as numerous smaller but nevertheless equally interesting ones like those spanning across central america the atlantic rainforest of brazil the west african rainforests to the mountain rainforests of east africa following along to madagascar throughout all the melee archipelago even to the very tippy top of australia but then you've probably noticed there are some areas beyond the tropics within the temperate latitudes where similar degrees of rain can fall this in turn supports several cases of what we'd call temperate rainforests and it's here that we truly start getting into some unexpected places to understand why though we're going to need to take a step back and look at the earth's climate system and wind patterns as a whole like this we can see that unlike their tropical counterparts which benefit from the continual intake of warm air thanks to their
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