NAM still going for it Mon-Tue
Let the drooling continue...
America's Rainiest City?
Ketchikan, Alaska is known for two things: salmon and rain. I know this well as I have been here several times visiting family. The combination of wind and rain often makes it feel like you are living in a car wash. Ketchikan, which is located on the inland passage in southeast Alaska, has fully embraced it's status at the Rain City . It proudly displays a "liquid sunshine gauge" on the boat dock showing just how wet it is. A closeup shows that they claim an average rainfall of 12.5 ft (150") per year. That's a lot of rain and, perhaps not surprisingly, Ketchikan is widely promoted as the rainiest city in America (e.g., destimationalaska.com ). Being a meteorologist, I began to wonder if this was really the case. There are the usual challenges in evaluating such a claim. What is meant by a city? What is the period of record? Is the data reliable? Etc... For the purposes of this post, we'll concentrate on clima...
two surprises so far for this trough. The first is the current temperatures. The National Weather service had SLC in the lower to mid 60s today, but so far the high for the day is 53. This is probably due to the second surprise, which is that it has been raining all day without a break (Jim I believe just two weeks ago you told me SLC never had a "rainy day"). Radar echoes show persistent trailing stratiform rain in the valley. The low max is a bit odd even with the rain because southern Utah also has current readings in the 50s. I am curious to see what the afternoon sounding looks like
ReplyDeleteYup, all generalizations are wrong. This is a great rainy day. I'm about to go out for a run in it just to get the full experience.
ReplyDeleteThe RUC2 this morning had us at about 2C at 700 hPa. With well mixed conditions, we've been in the 60s. Instead, we have an impressively deep layer of moisture and warm advection and persistent rain all day. Nearly every tilt of the radar had returns this morning...sort of like a PacNW radar volume.
I do think that the precip and related diabatic cooling is important. It's in the low 50s along the Wasatch Front, but there are some 60s out in Dugway, including two 65s out on the west side of the range. A radar loop shows the back edge of the precip has been sitting between us and them for much of the day.
Oh...I forgot to mention that I've been wondering why we're not having the usual nice, dry southern Utah CBL moving north with the southerly flow. Perhaps the precursor trough that rumbled through there with the Rex Block established a moister land-surface and airmass than usual.
ReplyDelete