Does it rain all the time in Seattle?

If I had a buck for everytime I heard that question being posed to me when I told someone I was living in Seattle - I'd be a millionaire with a house by the lake. Instead I am in a small condo by Bellevue with a view to a treetrunk.

I am sure all Seattleites have heard it before from the rest of the nation: "Seattle? It rains *all* the time there, doesn't it?" The truth is that it doesn’t rain all the time here -- or even half the time -- or even 1/10th the time.

One thing we were taught in Tepper was analytical decision making - the ability back statements/decisions by hardnumbers (though I do use a lot of gut in my decisions - and they are not half as hard). Anyways - according to NOAA stats, if you add up all the hours it's rained and divide by the number of hours in the year, it really only rains in Seattle 9.4% of the time. Even in the soggy winter, it's at most 18% of the time.

And the wettest place around -- Forks and their 137 inches of rain a year -- it only rains 21% of the time (Although it's 33% in the winter.) Many large cities on the east coast (Atlanta, NYC, DC) receive more annual precipitation than Seattle. However it when it stops raining in these east coast cities, the sky clears - in Seattle when it stops raining,the sky stays overcast.

So the question goes - why am I writing about rain in Seattle all of a sudden ??? For one it has been raining for the whole of last 2 wks after a gorgeous summer and I thought I might as well check out how much it really rains in Seattle.

9.4% is the answer.... Apparently 0.094 feels a lot more than what it used to feel like!

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 08, 2005
  What a typical cool Tepper style analysis! There must be something in common in our brains that Tepper shaped in. :-)
  
  Jonghee