Oregon wetness

The National Weather Service forecasts rain essentially all week, but cumulous clouds and spots of blue in the sky this morning suggested that I might take a chance with some field research at work today.  My current project is centered around studying salt marsh plant and algal distributions along salinity and tidal elevation gradients in Oregon.  Our current field work mainly involves GPS surveying to obtain high resolution vertical data to match up to our plant surveys gathered during the summer.  NOAA weather forecasts aren't really too reliable here on the central Oregon coast; we're the first place to experience all of the nasty fronts that come off of the Pacific.  They typically come quickly.  Sure enough, we were only partly through the short drive to the local estuary field site when heavy rains hit.  They lightened up at the boat launch a short time later and we continued.  Once in the marshes, the fronts kept coming: hail, rain, lightning, and sunshine, all within the span of less than a half hour.  More hail and rain later.  Water invades from every direction here in the tidal marshes, so one will inevitably be wet.  The tidal marshes exist in the thin vertical layer of space between the tidal influences from below and the freshwater inputs from above.  That thin layer of space oscillates daily with tides and weekly to seasonally with rainfall patterns, so plants and animals must be able to cope with wide variations in salinity and inundation.