wettest us cities

All posts tagged wettest us cities

Three weeks ago today, it was the end of 2010. To celebrate, here are the top 10 wettest major U.S. cities in 2010. The same rules apply for here as the driest cities: only cities with a population of 100,000 or more, and have stats available on the NWS climate pages, are eligible to be on this list. In all, 152 cities in the United States matched the criteria. Precipitation is measured in inches in liquid equivalent.

Wettest Major U.S. Cities
Rank City Precipitation
1 San Juan, PR 89.51
2 Miami, FL 65.10
3 Mobile, AL 59.87
4 Fort Lauderdale, FL 59.44
5 Nashville, TN 59.08
6 Wilmington, NC 58.57
7 Tallahassee, FL 58.54
8 Charleston, SC 57.57
9 Baton Rouge, LA 55.27
10 New Orleans, LA 53.92

Have a great weekend everyone!

By Patrick – Need to hijack Stephen’s post for a second just to say that we did a full update on all of the snowiest cities in the US and it’s getting tighter near the top :) We now return to Stephen ;)

Remember that only cities with a population of 100,000 or more, and have stats available on the NWS climate pages, are eligible to be on this list. In all, I am keeping track of precipitation stats for 152 cities in the United States. Of the 152, the top 5 driest and top 5 wettest will be posted here.

Data is from December 12th.

Driest Major U.S. Cities
Rank City Precipitation
1 Las Vegas, NV 4.26
2 El Paso, TX 6.51
3 Bakersfield, CA 6.91
4 Palmdale, CA 7.58
5 Albuquerque, NM 7.89

Wettest Major U.S. Cities
Rank City Precipitation
1 San Juan, PR 84.00
2 Miami, FL 63.96
3 Mobile, AL 59.04
4 Nashville, TN 58.41
5 Fort Lauderdale, FL 58.39

Just for fun, here’s how the top 5 snowiest cities stack up against each other in precipitation amounts.

Snowiest Major U.S. Cities
Snow Rank City Precipitation
1 Syracuse, NY 40.82
2 Minneapolis, MN 31.86
3 Spokane, WA 17.29
4 Rochester, NY 37.01
5 Anchorage, AK 15.93

I’ll try and do a better job of updating these a little more frequently as we’re approaching the end of the year.

Have a great week everyone!

Before I get into the top 5 driest and wettest U.S. major cities, here’s a brief idea of how I collected the data. First, the cities must have a population size of 100,000 or more. Second, populations are not added for a site that has multiple city names. For example, Seattle-Tacoma just goes as Seattle for this list, and just uses the Seattle population to determine if it is a major city. Also, the city must have an official National Weather Service reporting site. Finally, if a city has multiple NWS sites, I use the one that seems to be the most official, usually the one that is listed first on the NWS observed weather reports pages. If you have any questions/comments about my method, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Now for the lists. Data is from November 7th.

Driest Major U.S. Cities
Rank City Precipitation
1 Las Vegas, NV 4.12
2 Honolulu, HI 5.26
3 Bakersfield, CA 5.84
4 El Paso, TX 6.51
5 Palmdale, CA 7.31

Wettest Major U.S. Cities
Rank City Precipitation
1 San Juan, PR 78.67
2 Miami, FL 63.76
3 Fort Lauderdale, FL 58.27
4 Wilmington, NC 54.39
5 Mobile, AL 54.31

I’ll try to get updates going each week depending on how the statistics change.

Have a great week everyone!