Portland suffers through 'drippiest' February on record
If we had to sum up Portland's February rainfall in 2013, I'd have to go with "its bark was worse than its bite."
Never before has a Portland February had so many rainy days with so little to show for it in the rain gauge.
The month tallied just 1.26 inches of rain, spread out over 15 days with measurable rain -- an average of just 0.084" of rain per rainy day. (Coincidentally, Seattle had the exact same average daily rain ratio -- to the hundredth of an inch! -- spread out over 18 days until it rained a bit at 10 p.m. They ended up at 0.088" -- a record for them too.)
Eleven of our rainy days had less than a tenth of an inch and our wettest day was just 0.39" on Feb. 22.
That means 2013 steals the title from 2009 which had 1.36" of rain for 15 rainy days.
Overall, this month with go down as the "second-drippiest" on record, coming in just behind May 1955 that also had 15 rainy days but just barely eked out the win with 1.24" of rain for an average of 0.0827" per day of rain.
Top 5 Drippiest Months in Portland (at least 15 days of measurable rain)
1. May 1955: 15 rainy days: 1.24" of rain. 0.0827" per day of rain
2. Feb. 2013: 15 rainy days: 1.26" of rain. 0.0840" average
3. Feb. 2009: 15 rainy days: 1.36" of rain. 0.0907" average
4. Jan. 2001: 16 rainy days: 1.47" of rain. 0.0919" average
5. May 2004: 19 rainy days: 1.78" of rain. 0.0937" average
Honorable Mention: January 1977 had just 0.77" of rain spread out over 12 rainy days. (0.064" average)
Seems like a lot of you folks havent lived here long or don't remember Februarys of the past 40 plus years I have lived here.
Portland has the drips.
It's probably because I idle my SUV needlessly every chance I get.
The annoying part was the lack of several clear days in a row so I could spray my fruit trees with dormancy oil. Practically every February since I moved here had a week or so where it was dry enough.
@david_42 Yeah, at my place we would have some mild temps in February .. Enough to have my trees blossom and then about a week of hard frost in early April.. Slim year for cherries ..
Maybe it won't rain so much this Spring...pffffssst!
I'd like to actually put in a garden this year. The last couple of years have been too wet to get anything planted.
@HenryBowman Go for it Henry .. I did a search on winter gardening in the Willamette Valley a few years ago and got some good tips ..
I would have loved to have a few really good snow days too. That would have been awesome!  Â
Can you say "Global Warming".
This trend is extremely concerning to me.
@Oregon7812 I do not see any trend. Could you please show me where you see the trend here? BTW, even if global warming theory was true, it says that the warming rate is less than 0.003 of a degree per year. Do you really think that 80 years of all over the scale measurements can have some meaningful trends?
What concerns me is that people who do not know what they are talking about add to meaningless confusion.
@Oregon7812 As any politicized issue, here we have NASA using 140 year old measurements from sources that otherwise would no way be considered dependable. The measurements done in cities where naturally temperatures go up due to artificial heat sources. Measurement distribution is very selective and finally - the main question is What 80 years of temperatures warming to a fraction of a degree proves?
@Julie @Oregon7812 Only if you require a least squares linear fit to the data over the entire measurement period, which any eyeballing of the data shows to be a very poor choice indeed.
Even if you do, the temperature change is at least a degree C or more over 130 years, which works out to more than double  your 0.003 number.Â
What was that about meaningless confusion?
@Festivus Not sure where you got your degree C - all teh graphs I see chow fractions of a degree from end to end. However, I am sure that many places on earth had significant warming that exceed 1C and others had cooling. This has been happening since forever - there are multiple scientific proves to it. And since statistics is the only way to defend global warming theory - would you conclusively state 1. the trend of global warming and 2. (more importantly) the cause of the trend to be CO2 and that 3. CO2 was produced by human activity? For teh theory of global warming to be true all 3 conditions have to be true.
Errm, OK. Here's some trend graphs. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
They all seem to be trending up, what does that mean? Who knows.
@Oregon7812Â It's called summer.
In February?
@Oregon7812 I thought we were supposed to say "global climate change". Apparently you didn't get the memo.
No kidding...