Do you like your weather wet or dry?
When air meets mountains it has nowhere to go but up.
Rain is abundant where air rises, lightest where air sinks. The rainiest places are usually found on the windward side of mountains, and the driest on the leeward slopes. The most extreme rainfall in the united States is on Hawaii蘑菇视频 Mount Waialealeon. On the island of Kauai, the mountain蘑菇视频 average rainfall per year is 460 inches. The world蘑菇视频 record rainfall is from a place in India called Cherrapunji, which received 1,042 inches in one year. Their average is around 500 inches per year.
In the continental United States, the Olympia National Forest in Washington State catches large amounts of moisture laden clouds sweeping in off the Pacific Ocean, dumping between 140 and 170 inches per year. As these clouds move over the top of the mountains and down the other side they create a rain shadow and places 30 miles east of the mountains receive less that 15 inches per year. It may surprise some to learn that cities like Seattle and Portland in the Pacific Northwest are much drier that any major city on the east coast. Seattle and Portland both get a lot of cloudy days with light rain and drizzle in the winter season, but summers in both Seattle and Portland are sunny and dry and often go months without any measurable rain. Rainfall in both of these cities is 38 inches per year. In contrast, Boston measures 44 inches, while New York gets 43 and Philadelphia 41.
The ten rainiest metro areas in the United States are all in our Southeastern states with Mobile, Alabama at 65 inches followed by New Orleans at 62 and Miami at 60. As a reference point, Southwestern Pennsylvania averages 40 inches of rain each year.
It is also interesting to note that Pennsylvania has its own rain shadow with 54 inches of rain in our mountains at Chalk Hill, just east of Uniontown, while the city of Wellsboro on the eastern side of the ridges averages just 37 inches per year.
If you like your weather dry, you may try living in Yuma, Arizona, where just 3 inches of rain per yearfalls and is followed by Las Vegas with 4 inches and Los Angeles with 10 inches. If you just hate wet weather there is a place called Arica in Chile that averages only 0.03 hundreds of an inch of rain per year and the Atacama Desert in the same area of Chile went a record of 993 days without any measurable rainfall. Every 5-7 years, this same place during an El Nino weather event can see the desert floor become a carpet of pink and white flowers following one of these rare rainfalls.
Wet or dry take your pick?