The coast works like a conductor: it doesn't create the music, but it sets the rhythm and direction. Every morning, the sun heats the land faster than the sea, and warm air rises over the sand, pulling moist ocean winds inland. By evening, the land cools, and the wind turns back. This daily pendulum makes clouds line up along the water's edge.

It turns out that over the Malay Archipelago, the Gulf of Panama, Madagascar, and the Mediterranean, between forty and sixty percent of all precipitation is born from proximity to land. On some individual islands, this share reaches two-thirds. This method helps verify how well weather and climate models reproduce coastal rain, and thus better predict downpours near coastlines.