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Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

>> 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.

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