The Year That Broke Portland’s Rain Counter

For years, I’ve had a Portland rainy day counter. 

Right on bottom of this page.

But this rainy season of 2016-2017 the counter broke. Or more specifically, the rainy season broke me – since I have to manually update the rainy day counter!

So much rain, so little time.

Here it is, then, in one lump some payment: 149 rainy days as of Saturday evening April 29, 2017. This is the most rainy days Portland has had in a single rainy season, which runs from October 1 – May 31 each year. And we have a lot of time left to add to this total.

And if you look at October to April this has been Portland’s 2nd wettest in history. We’re closing in on 46″ when we should be at 29″ since October 1. That’s about 160% of average.

We also had 11.2″ of snow during the winter which we’ve exceeded just a handful of times since the 1940s; our 5th highest one day snow total of 6.5″ on January 10; record cool weather; our strongest April wind gust in more than 50 years (56mph) and our latest ever date to top 65 degrees, which happened on April 21st. We’re still waiting on 70 degrees.

There has been way too much whining and complaining this rainy season (much of it from me) so here, now, is a silver lining: 88% of Portland’s annual rain falls between October 1 and May 31. We’ve almost made it through!