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...
Another thing that really impressed me with this storm system was the main frontal precipitation band. For those who were not awake to see the rain/snow transition on Saturday night (between about midnight and 1 a.m.), it had probably the largest snowflakes I have ever seen. Some of the aggregates were over 2" and probably close to 3" in diameter. Snowfall rates briefly reached or exceeded 4" per hour, at least in parts of the valley.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy reading you're archive for snowstorms as Mom was born in the Salt Lake City area in the late 50s and I was born in the 80s in Chico California.
ReplyDeleteWe live in Oregon in the late 90s because Mom knew some friends from the 70s that she is still in touch with and job changes to make a very long story short.
By the way. The precipitation rates according to SLC airport are 0.25 during the snowfall event!
ReplyDeleteI bet the snowflakes were quite large right after the switch over during the 12-3am frames.