It’s raining today. Not a typical Seattle drizzle, but actual rain with very dark sky and big ol’ drenching drops.
Seattle has a reputation, of course, for rain. But I think that’s over exaggerated. Calling Seattle rainy is not unlike calling a depressed relative mercurial — Seattle is too drizzly and gloomy to be called rainy. Hawaii is rainy. Florida is rainy. Seattle is mostly just drizzly. At least that’s my perception as a lifelong resident. Is that supported by data?
According to various sources, Seattle averages about 150 days of rain per year. In those 150 days it rains about 37 inches (up slightly from my childhood when it was about 36).
150 days of 37 inches of rain. That means it rains on average about 2 days in 5 over the course of the year. About 1/4th of an inch — which is light rain over the course of 24 hours — every day that it rains.
Conversely it rains 128 days in Miami, dropping 62 inches of rain during those days. Put another way, that’s 1 day in 3 where in rains but half an inch of rain (twice that of Seattle) every day that it rains (I remember being in a rainstorm in Miami when I was a kid. It was raining so hard we couldn’t actually drive and traffic literally stopped on the freeway. I’ve never experienced that in Seattle, ever).
New York? It rains about 120 days and 50 inches. Just like Miami, it rains less days than Seattle but when it rains it still rains a lot more than here in Seattle.
Seattle is known as a rainy city. But really it’s a cloudy drizzly city. Which kind of makes days like today — dark and soaking wet days— kind of fun IMO.
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