We can all look at see what the normal amount of raindays are per year but how many hours of rain, hail or snow do we actually get to enjoy?
In my part of the world most of the precipitation is from convective clouds rather than stratiform so rainfall durations are typically not long even though the totals can be high.
From 10 years of record I have an average rain-day total of 140 - so rain falls less than 40% of days.
I'm interested in some opinions now as it's pretty much guesswork for me to work out how many hours of rain occur each year. This is probably available for AWS?
I suppose 50% of raindays would have rain for an hour or less, 35% 2-4 hours and 15% longer or even a full day of rain.
So if I put:
70 days x 1 hour of rain
49 days x 3 hours of rain
21 days x 12 hours of rain
140 raindays produces 469 hours of rain per year or about 5% of the total hours in a year of 8,760 hours
It never snows here so the only other type of precipitation I'd see (at home) is hail. A couple of hailstorms at one specific address is about all that could be expected and it doesn't last long.
It's another factor why we chase and enjoy the precipitation so much - especially hail and snowfalls.
