We live in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range. We are also above 1000′ elevation. Our weather patterns differ from what happens in the valley. We average about 6° colder than our closest city and get more wind & rain.
Rain. That’s what I want to know. How much rain do we get. It seems like a lot. Some days it totally bums me out, but I love how lush and green the forest we call home is, so I’ll tolerate it.
Portland receives an average of 35″ – 40″ of rain annually. Temperate rain forests receive 55″ or more of rain. I’m going to take a wild guess and say we typically reach those 55″. A few hours north of us is the Olympic National Park in Washington. They get 140″+ of rain annually. I’m also going to take a guess and say we don’t get quite that much. My guesstimate is we will get somewhere between 60″ and 80″ of rain in 2017.
Farmer John put up a new weather station the evening of December 31st, so we were ready to start the new year collecting data. Woop, woop!
Here is what we have so far:
2017 Rainfall
2017 Rain Total: 154.63″
January: 12.12″ ( +22.5″ snow)
February: 30.18″ (+12.75″ snow)
March: 28.49″ (+7.5″ snow)
April: 15.45″
May: 7.16″
June: 3.28″
July: 0.01″
August: 0.34″
September: 5.02″
October: 15.06″
November: 25.54″
December: 11.98″ (+2.5″ snow)
January 2018 update: Apparently I was off on my guesstimate – by nearly half. We ended up with 154″ of rain in 2017. I knew we got a lot, but I didn’t know it would be that much. Maybe it was a really wet year? I will be keeping track in 2018 to compare.