Remembering Snow
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| Photo during heavy snow from the Bushnell/University of Utah North Redfield SnowCam. |
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...
Ah, snow. I remember it fondly. Here's a dumb question - It seems that for three straight winters the mean pattern has had a ridge parked off the California coast (not sure if my terminology is correct). So all storms either go up and over, missing Utah in the process, or split. We get temporary reprieves, and a stray storm gets through, but the ridge always rebounds. I've certainly observed winters that have a dominant theme or pattern all winterlong before. But it usually seems that the pattern is different every winter - some we see a strong southern storm track, some a northern track, and some feature a poorly-placed ridge.
ReplyDeleteIs my amateur perception correct - have we had the same basic pattern for three straight winters? If so, is that unusual? And what can we do to fix it? Send an army of butterflies to flap their wings in the south pacific?