Rain in Seattle #

As I’ve experienced Seattle weather day to day, my mind has come up with random theories for periods of the day (morning, afternoon) when it rains the most/least. This is important to me enough to think about because I commute by bike. Dodging the rain is really nice when possible so that I don’t get as wet on the way to work.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation at all with time of day and precipitation. Read on to see how I discovered this…

Data #

I thought I’d try answering the question once and for all by looking at some weather station data. I first tried getting data via this service: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets. Unfortunately, the data I got was pretty inconsistent. I talked to a meteorologist from NOAA via their help email and was redirected to some beta data. For this data, I needed to pick a station, so I looked in the hpd-stations-inventory file and found a list of Washington stations with coordinates. I loaded these up using Google Maps and found that the Everett station was the closest one to Seattle (there was no station in Seattle proper 🙁). Then I found and downloaded the file corresponding to this station ID (USC00452675).

Analysis #

I analyzed the data using plotly with this code. This code calculates the probability that it will rain in all the historical data during any given 15-minute interval and plots that number, with error bars given as the standard deviation. I first did data from 2019-2021 for speed of processing…

…and I saw some trends! Especially in August and July it looked like it didn’t ever rain in the afternoon. This got me excited to think I’d learned something, so I ran with more data (2000-2021)…

…and everything averaged out 😦.

Categories: Datavis