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...
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