Quote:
Originally Posted by Metro-One
I wanted to start it off by posting a few graphs I made today to shed some education on the myth that the West Coast is always rainy and wet.
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I have to challenge the original poster's methodology here for "dispelling the myth that the West Coast is always rainy and wet" by attempting to compare volumes of precipitation between cities.
The volume of rain is seldom the thing people complain about with regards to either Vancouver or Victoria - it is the constant cloudiness and the ever present dribbling of rain that wears people down and refer to those climates as unpleasant (some would certainly say "brutal").
Compare a place like Miami, whose rainiest month is almost twice as rainy as Vancouver's rainiest month. If you are going by absolute precipitation volumes, you would assume that Miami would be the worse place to spend the month. Consider however, that the rainiest month in Vancouver sees more than 20 days of the month under a cloud of rain, compared to only 17.9 rainy days in Miami's month (which sees almost twice the volume of rain).
Consider also that in that month Miami has a glorious 262 hours of sunshine, which is nipping at the heel's of Vancouver's famously sunny and warm summers, which peak at 289.8 hours of sunshine (this is comparing the *most* rainy Miami month with the *least* rainy Vancouver month in terms of hours of sunshine).
By contrast, the least amount of sun Miami gets all year is 216 hours in a month in December, compared to a paltry 56.5 hours in Vancouver for the entire month (combined with again, 20 days on average of rain).
There is no "myth about the West coast of Canada being wet and rainy". It is a fact.
The summers, however, are some of the best in Canada. Sunny, very little rain, very comfortable temperatures (much more comfortable than Miami and Texas summers, for example). The winters, absolutely deserve their reputation for being soul crushingly brutally rainy, cloudy, and dreary. And I think anyone who lived through Vancouver's most recent winter season can attest to that. Fortunately, not every winter is as brutal as this one, and it will unlikely repeat itself to that degree over the next few years.