How Rainy Is Seattle? It's Not Even in the Top of Major U.S. Cities (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How Rainy Is Seattle? It's Not Even in the Top of Major U.S. Cities (2019)

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50 pointsmgh282 comments

It's cloudy, but not necessarily rainy (though there's plenty of that too). Even measuring the "number of days of rain" isn't the right metric for how Seattle gets it's reputation.

Look at the "cities with the least amount of sun": https://www.city-data.com/top2/c475.html - the entire top 20 is cities in Western WA.

I know a few folks who live in Seattle, and they all - at one point or another - attempted to convince me Seattle is not rainy. This alone is a proof Seattle is rainy enough.

On a more serious note, I agree it is about relatively little sun rather than amount of rain per se that builds this cloudy, rainy feeling in Seattle.

Total volume of rain is fairly meaningless here. The rain in Seattle comes less as "rain", and more as a mist that never ends for 3/4ths of the year.

It's like standing under the vegetable misters at the grocery store if they turned out the lights.

Exactly, people call it "rainy" when it may not technically be raining.

Seattle has a very distinctive weather pattern, and it does NOT burn off like morning fog in other cities, even though it has some similarities to heavy fog.

The rain often comes at night too, so for much of the year you experience a feeling that it has just rained, and everything is wet, but it's not actively raining.

A thing I learned in a random puzzle quest that stuck with me is that much of the PNW makes up North America's largest rainforest. We associate the term rainforest primarily with Tropical Rainforests and especially the Amazon Forest in South America, but the Pacific Northwest has and is a rainforest. Rainforests themselves are named that not for volume of rain that they have, but the consistent feeling of rain that they have. The forest itself helps build and maintain that constant "misting" water cycle that gives the feeling that it is consistently raining/has just rained/will still be raining for months at a time. That's an important part of the ecodiversity of the region, so it makes sense that it also becomes an important part of the human culture of the region (that reputation that "Seattle is always raining" despite having less rainfall than many other major US cities by volume and other metrics). But yeah, its always raining in the manner of a rainforest, not the manner of a squall or rainstorm.

There are even boas in the PNW, albeit very small and cute ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_boa

yes absolutely! The region is a "Temperate Rainforest."

> attempted to convince me Seattle is not rainy. This alone is a proof Seattle is rainy enough.

How is that proof? Do you expect all people eventually lie to you?

Seattle mists a lot, but rarely rains hard. Natives know better than to even own raincoats or umbrellas.

There was some old stat about highest sunglasses sales per capita in Seattle. That was because of unexpected sunbreaks.

Maybe because nobody ever bothered to try convince him that Yuma, Arizona, is not rainy.

Yeah by far the worst experience of living there is the lack of sunlight and not the rain. Watching the sunset at 4pm while you're still stuck in an office is brutal. Much of the winter you'll wake up in darkness, go to work, and come home in darkness.

It's worth it for the summer and fall though, at least when things aren't on fire. I've never experienced nicer and more consistently amazing weather than the PNW in summer and early fall.

> Watching the sunset at 4pm while you're still stuck in an office is brutal. Much of the winter you'll wake up in darkness, go to work, and come home in darkness.

This is orthogonal to the cloudiness issue, and is the norm in most northern cities. At least it's not cold in Seattle.

First off, please stop using "orthogonal" like that. Second, the cloud cover is not "unrelated" (if that's what you meant) to the wake up and come home in darkness issue. Portland and Seattle are often dismal and dreary, but not totally "dark" in the mornings and early afternoons, making it feel and look "dark" more often here than other cities where the sun gets a chance to peek through at those early and late hours.

And I disagree with "it's not cold in Seattle." It may not be freezing most of the time, but weeks of consistent 35-45 degrees Fahrenheit weather with little sun certain feel "cold."

> First off, please stop using "orthogonal" like that.

Sorry, I will not.

> And I disagree with "it's not cold in Seattle." It may not be freezing most of the time, but weeks of consistent 35-45 degrees Fahrenheit weather with little sun certain feel "cold."

It's fair to disagree - there is a variation in people's perceptions of temperature. Having lived in colder places, it's extremely pleasant not to have to cover head, ears, and neck, and walk around without zipping up my jacket. It's extremely nice to walk 30 minutes in Seattle weather and not have my nose run from the cold. These are luxuries you don't get in colder climates - including Boston, NYC, Chicago, etc.

I haven’t spent time around Seattle, but I’m wondering if you have spent much time in the Bay Area peninsula and how you would compare the climates of the two. Picking Redwood City as a good “middle of the peninsula” location (and whose slogan is “climate best by government test”) and comparing climate stats with Seattle, it seems to me that I would prefer Redwood City in nearly every category. The clearest advantage Seattle has is the extra hour of daylight in the summer, but of course you pay that back in the winter.

Serious question, why hasn't the PNW taken on the Norwegian model of winter work? Up and to work early, leave while it's still light outside, take a few work calls in the evening from home after time with the family while it's still dark out?

TIL… Probably no one has heard of it.

exactly. spent 20 gray, drizzly, and damp years there. then came to California and realized there was life outside the stratocumulus. also in the winter it gets dark dreadfully early (~1615).

[edit 1] That said the summers are beautiful. Long days, fresh water lakes, boating, clean and crisp feeling (at least when I was there many years ago). The problem is there's no guarantee you'll get a nice day even in the summer so you end up at the mercy of that dampness.

I went to UW, and lived in Seattle for 6 years. It was miserable. The city's natural surroundings are gorgeous, but it's always cold and damp so you can't really enjoy it (unless you particularly like that kind of weather).

For about a year there was a fantastic hiking trail that started about 50 feet off my front yard. I think I walked it once...

Like you, I moved to California. Night and day difference.

Similar experience, lived in both Seattle and Portland. There is a lot to like about the Pacific Northwest and I loved living there the first few years. But as the years passed I got a bit more depressed.

Had to pay a lot more to move to California, but the sunshine tax has been worth it for me.

Same. Lived in Seattle for nearly a decade. Then I moved to San Francisco (which itself isn't known for being sunny or warm) and it was like I moved to LA. Such a dramatic difference to my mental well-being.

I grew up in a fairly dark, cloudy place and never thought anything of it, but Seattle broke me. I'm extremely sensitive to sunlight now.

The article actually mentions what you're talking about. A mist that keeps things moist almost year-round rather than bouts of strong rain.

Exactly this

This is the best way to look at it. I live in a hot sunny city that technically gets more rainfall than Seattle. But we’re also in a drought and when it does rain it’s a lot at once that mostly runs off. For example a couple weeks ago my house got over 4” of rain in less than an hour but now I’m right back to strict water usage rules in terms of landscape watering cycles, etc. I tend to think of Seattle as moist. I’ve spent a grand total of about 2 weeks there but even in middle of summer when I go on a hike I can tell the soil contains some moisture and has been wet recently. I’m sure it helps that the big trees and shade help slow down evaporation.

Same for England. People think it's very rainy, but it's mostly just cloudy.

I have a feeling this is a case of lies, damned lies, and statistics, so let's look at typical summer rain day in Miami, the city of my youth, and #2 on the list.

You wake up and it's sunny. Throughout the day, clouds build over the everglades. You get beautiful puffy cumulus clouds dotting the sky. Around mid-afternoon, darker clouds float in from the everglades and intersect with the cool ocean breeze:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Miamisum...

You get lightning and thunder and it starts to rain. It rains buckets of water of biblical proportions the likes of which you have never seen for about 30 minutes. Then it stops and suddenly it is sunny again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPNwuPen1zQ

That's it. A rain day in Miami is typically a 30-minute extremely intense event surrounded by sunshine on both sides.

Compare that with my current city, #14 on the list, and typical of a mid-Atlantic state in late spring. Today, we'll have drizzle all day long and 100% cloud cover. I imagine this is much more like most Seattle rain days than a Miami rain day. We'll get less rain all day today than Miami does in 30 minutes. While they are both nominally rain days, they leave very different impressions.

A good example how a little statistical manipulation can mislead people. Miami in this above chart says it rains more, and has almost as many rainy days, than Seattle-- yet, when we look at other data that compares amount of sunshine, Miami is incredibly sunny compared to Seattle:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ccd-data/pctposrank.txt

Seattle isn't rainy. It's pathetically drizzly. Flimsily misty more than anything. It hardly ever rains in seattle. By rain, I mean a real downpour where you can get soaked. The kind of rain you need an umbrella for. Hardly anyone owns an umbrella in seattle for a reason.

And when it does rain, the roads flood, and the trees all come down in the wind, because the 100' tall pine has a root ball that goes down two or three feet (as there's no need to go deeper for water, given the constant drizzle). When that top layer of soil is saturated and no longer structural, there's literally nothing holding the tree up anymore. Plus literally everything grows moss.

And if you live in the east side you get to enjoy power loss. Lol

I was actually amazed at how few trees came down in the wind, given how tall and skinny the trees are.

I moved to Seattle from Southern California, with a motorcycle as my transport, and I lasted one month before I moved away. It drizzled every single day.

I always thought downpours were just a movie special effect; Not real.

I stood in awe when I went to Florida.

I had a similar belief that ended much the same.

hahaha. Yeah, the rain in the southeast has some heft to it.

>> Hardly anyone owns an umbrella in seattle for a reason.

Umbrellas are for people in cities without real weather. They only work for vertical rain. The pacific northwest often gets rain+wind, which defeats umbrellas. It is also a fashion thing. Ever since GorTex became cheap, everyone wants to look like they climb mountains every weekend. A bright gortex jacket is far more cool than a folding umbrella.

> Umbrellas are for people in cities without real weather. They only work for vertical rain. The pacific northwest often gets rain+wind, which defeats umbrellas.

No. Everyone uses umbrellas in nyc and the surrounding metro area. You'll see a bunch of wind damaged umbrellas in garbage cans. A windy day in seattle is like a nice breeze compared to the wind in nyc, especially in winter. Yes, umbrellas are a nightmare when its windy. But people still use umbrellas because it's better to have your pants soaked than to have everything soaked.

I've lived in four of the top 10 "most rainy" cities on the list. They way it normally happens in all of them is that you'll have a bunch of sunny days, then a day where you might get anywhere from 0.5-inch to 8+ inches of rain. Especially in the spring and summer. Four days ago it rained 2.5 inches in one day. This week it's all sunny.

I think this depends on the specific city. Your description was my experience growing up in Miami - during the wet season, you'd have a good number of dry days and then a few days at a time with a lot of rain.

But where I live now in Jacksonville, it's not really this way. During the rainiest part of the year, roughly June - September or so, it rains in the afternoon probably 90% of the time, sometimes for an hour, sometimes til night. So there are still different ways of getting into that top 10.

I experienced the same thing when I moved to southeastern Ohio. I was used to rain coming in different kinds: mist, drizzle, soft rain, hard rain, downpour that would flood the street in half an hour, thunderstorms that made it dark at noon, wind-driven stinging rain, rain that would come and go every ten minutes, rain on a sunny day when you could look up and wonder where it was coming from. Southeastern Ohio had only one kind of rain. It was consistent, sustained, medium-soft rain. Enough that you couldn't ignore it, enough that you'd get wet without an umbrella. Just that much, never more, never less. Maddening. It was like God left his laziest angel in charge of the weather, and he was sitting in a control room flicking a switch between "gray clouds with rain" and "gray clouds without rain" just often enough not to get fired.

Uh, the list right there in the article puts Seattle as the 4th rainiest cities by days with rain. That sounds pretty rainy to me. :shrug:

Seattle is also more rainy (by volume) that London UK. And more rainy (by days of sunshine) than Scotland.

As I always say "it doesn't rain a lot in Seattle, it just rains all the time."

Maybe time to update your quote to say Buffalo instead of Seattle then, as it has more rainy days than Seattle or any other major US city.

Sure, it rains/snows half of the year, but it rains the mostly in the winter-spring half of the year. So there's some reprieve in the summer and fall months. Seattle sees the sun, in what, July-August?

That makes a big difference, I think. Grey, gloomy, rainy days are more impactful when they occur during the times you want to be outside. Generally speaking, you can make outdoor plans on Lake Erie during the summer and be pretty confident it won't rain.

Right now though? It's going to be raining/snowing basically most days for the next few weeks.

If you're counting precipitation, it'll be different than how people count it. Seattle basically never snows, Buffalo gets a few months of snow.

Coming from Boston (and then returning to Boston), my favorite part of Seattle was the weather. It was so mild all the time, didn't need to think about it (except the one week in the summer everyone would melt because nobody had A/C).

This is how I feel coming from Illinois. It’s basically always spring in Seattle

Same. I lived in Chicago and NYC before living in Seattle for a couple years and found the weather to be gorgeous almost year round. Weather-wise it was significantly better than both.

Lots of sun and plenty clear days and so much to do and see when the weather was right. When it did rain it was just a little mist or the occasional drizzle.

What's funny is that every time I see Seattle in a movie or tv show, it's constantly pouring. Weather I've almost never seen there for longer than a couple hours.

We moved to Portland, Oregon from Jackson, Mississippi last year. Portland, like Seattle, is a stereotypical "rainy" city and Jackson is not.

Jackson gets almost 10 inches MORE rain per year on average than Portland does. For one thing, in Portland it doesn't rain at all from mid June to mid August (it rains year round in Jackson).

But reputations are interesting things!

IME it rains harder in the midwest, for less time. In Portland it pizzles most of the winter. Not really raining hard, just constantly wet. But summers are excellent.

I also think this has changed a lot in recent years. I've been in Portland close to 50 years and it feels like the climate has been growing warmer and drier over time.

The total amount of rain really isn't important to human perception, save perhaps flooding. One day where you get ten inches of rain vs the same ten inches spread over 100 days - people will say the second is "rainy" and the first not.

Gulf South rain is such a different beast from the incessant drizzle the Northwest gets. Southern rain comes in, does its business with a solid downpour, maybe some lightning, and leaves. The skies clear and you get sun. Northwest rain just sits there with an incontinent drizzle and grey skies for days on end.

Make sure you’re getting lots of vitamin D supplements, because you’re not getting the kind of sunshine your body’s used to.

Rain was never my problem with Seattle's weather. It was the lack of sun and the darkness in the winter that forced me out. Living there when I was younger I didn't know any different. It wasn't until I moved and lived somewhere else for a bit that I realized there was a better place for me out there.

Sun has such a positive effect on my mood I don't know how I did it there for so long.

I was never really bothered by the rain in seattle, it was the overcast that did me in. Everything felt so muted with no crisp shadows.

Muted is a perfect description. The lack of sun, almost constant cloud cover and moisture/slight fog in the air always makes all of the vibrant colors seem dull. Muted. It's like having your RGB color ranges only go to 128 instead of 256. Then summer comes and everything is bright and colorful for 3 months, and everyone has a smile on their face again. They might actually say, "hello."

For me, April to late September is perfect in Seattle. My only gripe is the month of continuous rain in the winter.

Ma family is from very sunny French Provence, and my brother married a girl from very not sunny Bretagne. The definition of "sunny" and "rainy" is.. up in the air.

Examples: - is a sunny day a day during which you see the sun once for 4 mins, or during which you mostly see the sun, during which you don't see a cloud at all, during which you see some clouds with no chance of rain, .... - is a rainy day a day during which you see some heavy clouds and rain is so probable you should not plan a picnic, it may rain at any moment, it rains some, it never stops raining ... - can the same day be both rainy and cloudy ? -when we say "rainy", do we mean lots of mm of water, lots of days w/ rain, lots of days w/o sun. My previous county (in the Cévennes) had bth France's dryest spot, and its wettest. But not its sunniest nor its rainiest. - when I went to Bretagne, what shocked me was not so much the amount of rain, but the amount of clouds, and the speed of weather change, and the facts that very few days were pure rain or pure sun. In my Provence, I can usually tell 1 day in advance when it's gonna rain, sometimes 2 days, always on the same day. In Bretagne ? You can't know if it's gonna rain 2 hrs on.

In the end, in Provence a rainy day is when we get one drop of rain. In Bretagne, a sunny day is when they get one ray of sun. We're right, and they're wrong ^^

Ohioans know.

I grew up a few miles away from the Ravenna Arsenal in Northeast Ohio. The reason that I always heard for the military choosing that location to store munitions in World War II was because it had as much cloud cover year-round as pretty much any place in the nation. (Bombers and spy planes like to have clear days.) If you're looking for a place that is very wet but not on the ocean, the Great Lakes are where you want to be.

And we get brutal winters to boot! I like to joke about the enduring myth of there being an object in the sky called "the sun" that makes the sky glow during the day.

Something else I noticed while living in Seattle. Compared to the US East coast and much of the mid-west it's FAR less muggy year-round in spite of constant overcast, rain, or mist for most of the year.

I remember flying from Seattle to London a few years back and was surprised that in spite of the same weather, London was almost unbearably muggy -- it felt like I stepped into a swimming pool my skin felt so moist.

Could someone relate "muggy" to specific metric(s) that might support these claims?

In my experience most weather is reported with relative humidity, but dew point is also important. When the dew point reaches a certain level it is described by some as feeling "muggy". There is a feeling that your skin is wet because moisture on your skin has slowed (or stopped) evaporating because the air has saturated with moisture.

https://www.weather.gov/arx/why_dewpoint_vs_humidity

In hind sight I explained that poorly, but I'm also distracted in a meeting, so should probably be focusing on that. :-D

I always associate muggy with humidity

People come up with statistics and convince themselves, but if you live in Seattle you know. It drizzles almost every day except during the summer

don't know how it compares to London, though that's often the "twin city" in these arguments

What do expats/immigrants from UK and Ireland think about Seattle? Does it feel similar to the English/Irish weather or is it worse? Also Scandinavians ? Been meaning to ask this question for a long time.

I would imagine for people from UK and Scandinavians Seattle and PNW weather isn't too depressing?

I'm from East England and moved to San Francisco for 12 years and have now lived in Seattle for 2 years.

Here is the secret of Seattle, why people live here: the summer is absolutely bonkers nice.

For example in the last 2 years, temperatures over 60 degrees, temperatures over 70 degrees, days with over 0.2" rain:

May: 9, 1, 7

June: 20, 5, 7

July: 31, 9, 1

August: 30, 10, 1

Sept: 23, 4, 5

It also remains super warm all evening. It's just great! But yes, being from windy gray England means Dec-Feb where it is very very grey doesn't bother me at all, I don't even notice it.

One thing is amount of precipitation. Another different thing is percentage of time cloud covered. Seattle is surely higher on the list with respect to the second thing, and thus it's reputation. In new Orleans, when it rains, it really rains hard, but it's sunny a lot too.

I've been to Seattle twice. Both times I visited in July, and the weather was beautiful for the duration of the trip. When I returned home and asked a co-worker why Seattle has the reputation for rain, he replied "because you went during the two weeks a year when it doesn't rain."

When I moved to Boulder, CO, I was lucky to have a view of the foothills at work. I was initially surprised at how frequently there was lightning/thunder activity in the foothills, accompanied by a light sprinkle of rain in Boulder.

Another example of how metric selection matters I guess.

I always felt Seattle got this reputation because we have so many transplants from California, particularly the Bay area and SoCal. Relative to there, it rains a lot.

Are we talking inches per year or days of sunshine per year?

The title and text is based on volume. But the chart included has both and Seattle is pretty darn rainy by days with rain.

Seattle gets a beautiful 5 non-contiguous weeks of summer. The rest of the time is rainy or overcast.

Source: I lived there for 8.5 years in the 2010s.

Thought New Orleans would be near the top of the list.

It's sandwiched between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. Additionally, there are other large thunderstorm producing lakes nearby like Lake Salvador. It is exceedingly odd out that way when you go more than 2 weeks without rainfall.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

https://s.w-x.co/staticmaps/wu/wxtype/none/usa/animate.png

This is what I tell people who are surprised that you don’t see many umbrellas in seattle. Hoodies yes. Flip your hood up and go on with your day.

The past couple of months though might be a bit different. The storm water area near me is overflowing.

At first I thought "oh neat maybe it's easier to grow plants there since it's wet all the time", but then I realized this is probably terrible for plants. Too wet, not enough sun, lower temps slow growth

Certain plants love it - pine trees and blackberries are among them.

It used to be that it would just mist for 6-7 months out of the year, instead of rain. And now it hardly even rains at all anymore. No longer a rainy city/region.

Last year, summer lasted from April to October.

I'm down a bit south of portland. Its not that it rains a ton. Its that except for the summer, it basically never stops raining. It gets OLD

I love rain, and was actually looking forward to having as much as people said when moving to Seattle. But as I discovered, the thing about Seattle rain is that, while frequent, it's more of an annoying mist that just kind of gets in your face, rather than actual pleasant pitter patter. The 3 months of summer though have pretty constant perfect weather that's hard to beat.

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