April 22, 2017

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America's Rainiest City?

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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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Escape from Utah

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In an effort to improve the snowfall situation in the Wasatch Range, I have left Utah for the rest of the cool season.   I'm serving as a guest professor at the University of Innsbruck for their so-called summer semester, which actually runs from March to June.  We arrived here on Wednesday.  It's been mild and sunny here with high temperatures above 10°C (no °F here) in Innsbruck each day.  Today I skied with some friends at Stubai Glacier, which reaches over 3000 meters elevation, to escape the heat.  It was a spectacular day.   Like Utah, Austria has had a largely crap snow season and the current warm spell isn't helping.  The snowpack on south aspects is pretty much non-existent below 1500 meters and in some areas much higher than that.  The snowpack is meager where it exists, even at the highest elevations.  Glacier-mounted lift towers today were on large domes of ice.  These are usually covered with white blankets (I'm no...
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The NWS Is Hiring

What is probably the biggest hiring action in modern National Weather Service history is now underway.  If you are looking for positions with that agency, government boilerplate with links are below.   The  DHA  announcements   for  the   Standing Register  Meteorologist, GS-1340-05/07/09  positions   have been posted. The  announcements are set to open  May 1, 2026  -  September 30, 2026 . PR-424133 ("Harder to Fill" Locations): Job Announcement # (DHA):  NWS-26-12947704-DHA https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/867259300 PR-424134 ("East" Locations): Job Announcement # (DHA):  NWS-26-12947756-DHA https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/867260400 PR-424136 ("West" Locations): Job Announcement # (DHA):  NWS-26-12947773-DHA https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/867260700
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