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Comment by jurassicfoxy | Hacker News Reader

Not in the PNW!

> A tourist arrives in Vancouver on a rainy day. He gets up the next morning and it's still raining. In fact, it's still raining three days later. He goes out to supper and spies a young kid. Out of despair, he asks, "Hey kid, does it ever stop raining around here?!" The kid says, "How should I know, mister? I'm only six."

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This was true 20 years ago. Nowadays, we joke about Juneuary and this year we had Maygust. Our summers are hotter and longer, winters bringing weeks of freezing and snow where I grew up expecting a single day of snow. The calm weeks-long drizzles of my childhood are gone, replaced with days-long "atmospheric rivers" called "monsoon" in warmer climes.

Is Juneuary June in January or the other way around?

June in January, and August in May. As a kid, we wouldn't expect to even see the sun until late May.

noooo i'm sure it's the opposite here. January in June. (very accurate in 2023)

An amusing joke, but while rain is frequent in the winter in the PNW (Pacific Northwest USA) the rain is often light. Seattle residents tend not to use umbrellas unless the rain is particularly heavy. It might not be a very good power source.

All it took was a year and a half in Bellevue and I've never needed protection from the rain ever since.

Now that I'm back in California I get a lot of weird looks in the office when I go out into the rain on purpose. It's a lot easier to appreciate the rain here when it's not raining nonstop for nine months.

Come spend some time in the Gulf Coast! Rain here actually physically hurts, sometimes. Big droplets (though probably not as big as the ones in the Alaskan Panhandle[0]), falling at a very rapid pace, looks and feels like a curtain of water. It's not unusual to have an inch an hour.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchikan,_Alaska#/media/File:...

I get the same puzzled bemusement here in Idaho. Originally from the Oregon Coast I now relish a good rain and love a long walk through it.

Seattle actually gets less rainfall per year than any major city east of the Mississippi. It's just overcast and misty/drizzly a lot in the winter. Summers are bone dry.

Yes and: Foggy. When I was a kid, typical day was foggy til noon.

As a fun data point, the capital of Sierra Leone gets more rainfall in a single month than the PNW gets in an entire year.

I was there in the rainy season, it rained harder than I ever imagined possible for ten hours a day, every day.

You sent me down a rabbit hole. Holy crap! The AVERAGE rainfall in Sierra Leone in August is over 600mm... 23 inches!

According to Wikipedia, the average August rainfall in the capital, Freetown, is over a meter (~42")[0]. Tropical wet-and-dry climates, they're wild!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown#Climate

Freetown gets more rain in one August week than my town (Scottsdale) gets in a full YEAR

It was seriously, seriously impressive to live in that environment.

I wound up finding mould on my clothes, on my fridge, inside my Jeep, etc. etc. It was extremely hard, so after a month I drove north into Mali where the rainy season was basically over :)

I saw rain staggeringly heavy more times than I can count on the West Coast of Africa - it was truly incredible. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I ever got it on film.

This same kid also walks around in Bergen, Norway

No, the kid i Bergen is twelve.

He didn't see sunny skies until he was already a man, and by then it was nothing to him but blinding!

Funny, but also very inaccurate for large parts of the PNW? Maybe it is always raining in Vancouver, but summer is remarkably dry in large parts of the area.

Edit: Granted, the time of the year that solar is likely too spotty, we do have rain.

I was visiting a friend in the PNW and we went for a walk. Shortly after we started, the drizzle started. Honestly, it felt great, the drizzle on the face. My clothes didn't really seem to be getting wet, either, that's how slight it was. Then, he mentioned "the rain" and I looked at him. Dude, you think this is rain? He said, yeah, it rains harder, but they consider this rain. I questioned him a bunch and it seems much of the time the rain was at drizzle level.

Now, this was in the 90s. I don't know if the rain is harder now, due to, you know, the changin' weather.

I think this is still very accurate. I tell folks from the south that ask if it rains a lot here, that they likely wouldn't call what we get rain. It definitely looks wet all the time in the winter. As if it always recently rained.

A drizzle is pleasant when it's warm but part of grim and cold weather when the temperature dips down (below 15-10°C?)

The other fun thing of the PNW is that it really doesn't get too cold that often. :D

Average daily high stays under 15ºC (~60ºF) from about November to April. Definitely cold enough that being damp is unpleasant, especially with any kind of breeze.

Depends on the rain. We don't have the cold rain I was used to from the south. Such that I'm perfectly fine biking in all year and basically all weather.

So you aren't wrong that it can certainly be unpleasant. But it isn't as bad as rain from where I grew up. By a long shot.

I lived in Vancouver for a number of years. I sure don’t miss the winter. Otherwise it’s a lovely part of the world. But the clouds and the rain really got to me.

Seattle rain festival; January 1st to December 31st.

100% it's always raining here it's especially bad in the summer.

Seattle has 156 rainy days per year, Vancouver has 168.

Honestly doesn't sound like that much to me. >150 is typical for most cities here in Germany. Munic has 193 rainy days per year.

So it just seems like the people living in the PNW are exaggerating a bit.

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