US cities with the most rainy days

Seattle's rainy reputation is real, but by the raw count of wet days it loses to upstate New York. Syracuse tops this list, with Everett, north of Seattle, just behind, and Rochester and Buffalo close by. The Great Lakes are the difference. The same lake moisture that fuels the snow belt keeps light rain and snow falling through most of the cold season, and the Northeast's storm track keeps summers damp too. Cleveland and Pittsburgh ride the same regime at the southern rim of the lakes. Nothing about it is dramatic. It is simply hard to string together dry days near the eastern Great Lakes.

The Pacific Northwest cluster earns its place a different way. From October through April a parade of Pacific systems brings long gentle rains to Everett, Seattle, Portland, and their neighbors, but their summers are genuinely dry. The wet season does all the work. That is also why the region's rain totals are modest compared with its reputation: NOAA normals put Seattle's annual precipitation below that of New York or Miami. Frequency, not volume, is the Northwest's specialty.

The pair of Florida cities near the top gets there by a third route. Coral Springs and Pompano Beach log about a hundred sixty wet days while also recording well over two hundred sunny days, which sounds like a contradiction until you picture the mechanism: a clear morning, a sea breeze thunderstorm in the afternoon, and a clear evening. In the warm season that cycle repeats nearly every day, so the same day frequently counts as both sunny and wet.

At the dry end sit the Las Vegas valley cities, where measurable precipitation arrives on roughly three weeks of days per year. A wet day here is any day with measurable precipitation, and the count is calibrated against the wet day tables in NOAA's published climate normals, which makes it one of the most tightly verified metrics on this site.