Washington State has a damp reputation for soggy weather. Often the local Chamber of Commerce will chime in about how we get less rain than most cities in the USA east of the Rockies. This is true and for the nation as a whole we really do not get much in the way of precipitation. Those people originating from a state west of the Rockies will find us much wetter than they are.
But even when we compare our Western Washington cities to Northern California, we are not that much higher on rainfall than they are, particularly within 50 miles of the ocean. The real issue is that we tend to have a lot more cloudy days than most of the western US. We however are no worse off than states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York on the sunshine scale.Anchorage, AK; Portland, OR; Buffalo, NY; Pittsburgh, PA; and Cleveland, OH round out the top five "gloomiest" cities in America in a climate survey done by Move.org. Seattle and Spokane were 6th and 7th on that list.
So cloud cover is a thing and Washington gets allot of cloudy days. But often coastal areas in California are overlooked in the "gloomy" category despite having a heavy marine layer that tends to make for foggy and cool weather in the summertime.
But what about actual rainfall? How rainy is it really. Typically rainfall is measured two ways by climatologists. Inches or Millimeters of rain measured in a rain gauge and number of days with measurable precipitation. When measuring actual rainfall volume we are lower than the national average, but when measured by number of days with rain, we are near the top. I created two lists below ranking Washington cities against other notable locales around the country for both rainfall and days of rain.
Here are the same four charts with a list of several cities from each region of the country. Each chart ranks the cities by a different metric starting with annual days of precipitation, then annual rainfall in inches, then the percentage of sunshine, then annual snowfall.
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