Who’ll stop the rain? Soggy January weather stalks Seattle

It was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.

But who could have expected it to land with such a thud?

Following one of the sunniest autumns in recent memory—punctuated by the driest November since the election of Jimmy Carter—Mother Nature has done a complete 180, directing a near-endless plume of rainfall into Western Washington this winter.

While the rainfall in and of itself hasn’t been off-the-charts impressive—monthly precipitation in Seattle for January stood at 7.42 inches as of midday Tuesday—the frequency of the rain this month has truly been something else.

Only one day without rain this month

Since the new year began, rain has blessed/cursed the city every single day of January, sans one: New Year’s Day. As of Tuesday midday, Jan. 1 remains the sole day this month to not bear witness to even a single drop of rain.

Every other day since has featured rain (or in a few cases, snow) to some degree—with Jan. 16 and 20 the only ones fortunate enough to squeak by with just a trace of precipitation to their names. A trace of precipitation means raindrops amounting to more than 0.00 inches in the rain gauge, but less than 0.01 inches—what the National Weather Service calls non-measurable precipitation.

This means that when it comes to measurable precipitation (amounts of 0.01 inches or more), it’s rained on all but three days so far this month. Even for Seattle, in the dead of winter, that’s extraordinary—to the extent that only two Januarys have ever pulled off this feat from start to finish: 1953 and 2006. Those two months are also numbers one and two on the city’s list of all-time wettest Januarys, with 12.92 and 11.65 inches falling in the inaugural months of 1953 and 2006, respectively.

January’s epitaph: 28 days and 28 nights of rain?

This January, by contrast, will likely finish short of even a top-five finish—another inch or so of rain is needed in Seattle by Friday night just to crack the top 10. But the difference between 12 inches of rain and 8 inches of rain over the course of a month is hard to discern, especially when it’s raining day-in and day-out, night-in and night-out, week-in and week-out … you get the point.

All this to say, the chances are extremely high that January 2020 concludes with measurable rainfall on 28 of 31 days, tying the city’s mark for most rainy days in January—and making it one of the gloomiest opening months of any year in Seattle history.

Somewhere, the vampires are smiling.