Old Retired Guy Blog
October 15, 2007
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Rain is all Relative
I usually agree with the comment and answer "It sure does" to the question. Now that I've lived in Wisconsin again for a few months, however, I'm beginning to rethink my answer to that question. We had a ton of rain here this summer, especially in August. Madison recorded 15.18 inches of rain in August. That was not only a record for the month of August, but it was the most rainfall in any month ever since they started keeping records in the 1870s. So, how do the two cities compare with respect to precipitation? If you'll pardon the facts and figures (my background is science and math, after all), here's what I found out.
This graph shows the average monthly precipitation in Madison (red line) and Portland (blue line). As you can see, if you like dry weather, it's kind of dumb to move to Madison in the summer time; that's when the city gets most of its rain! August is historically the wettest month. In Portland, however, the summers are very dry. July is historically the driest month with an average monthly rainfall on the order of 1/2 inch. If you were to add the topics of humidity and mosquitoes to this discussion, I think Portland would win a debate on being the more comfortable place to live in the summer. Overall, Portland has a higher annual rainfall than Madison. Its annual amount of 36.5 inches is 17% more than Madison's 31.2 inches. That's really not that much more. A difference that was more important to me than how much it rains was how it rained. In Madison, when it decides to rain it RAINS and gets it over with. Then the sun returns. In Portland, when it rains it kind of drizzles half-heartedly and takes forever to get it out of its system. The result is many more gray days.
This graph shows the average days per month with rainfall of 0.01 inch or more. Except for a few months (summer, unfortunately) Portland has many more days of rainfall. Annually, Portland has 151 days of rain, which is 27% more than Madison's 119 days. Madison has 32 more days with NO precipitation -- hey, that's more than a month of extra non-rainy days! So, I guess the answer to that rainfall question is yes it rains a lot (if you're counting rainy days) and no it doesn't rain a lot (if you're counting total rainfall).
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When I tell people that we lived in Portland, Oregon, for 25 years they
tend to say two things:
