When I was a kid I had a Heath kit weather station that I built. It was pretty flimsy and didn't last long in the Florida sunshine, but it was pretty neat to record my own weather observations. And for years afterward, I kept wanting to get a really good weather station. But it seemed that there were always higher priorities for our money, so it kept getting put off.
In the summer of 2001, I finally got my own weather station. It was a wireless version of Davis Instruments Vantage Pro. And boy was I proud. I could record my own weather observations electronically and post them to my web site where I could check out my temperatures or rainfall wherever I could find an Internet connection. And it had wind measurements. That was always the element that kept me from getting a weather station until technology finally brought the cost down while keeping the quality pretty high.
So now I have almost four years of weather records - a limited climatology for my location - so when I noticed that today's rainfall of 1.01 inches brought my monthly total to 8.67 inches, I got to wondering just where that stands in my climatology. After quickly running through all my data, I found that this July is the fifth wettest month in my records since December, 2001. The highest rainfall values recorded here include:
13.29" in May, 2003
11.41" in November, 2004
9.48" in September, 2002
9.41" in June, 2003
8.67" in July, 2005 [so far]
Okay, my period of record is pretty short. So I decided to use the climate query found via the Birmingham National Weather Service web site. After all, the climate data for Birmingham goes back into the late 1800s, so that ought to give me a better idea of how wet my July value is.
It turns out that my July rain total of 8.67 inches would tie the 101st wettest month ever recorded at the official observing site. 101st out of about 1315 monthly observations means that my value is actually in the top 8 percent of wettest months for central Alabama.
And we still have ten days in this month to record even more rain! Pretty wet, huh?
-Brian-
In the summer of 2001, I finally got my own weather station. It was a wireless version of Davis Instruments Vantage Pro. And boy was I proud. I could record my own weather observations electronically and post them to my web site where I could check out my temperatures or rainfall wherever I could find an Internet connection. And it had wind measurements. That was always the element that kept me from getting a weather station until technology finally brought the cost down while keeping the quality pretty high.
So now I have almost four years of weather records - a limited climatology for my location - so when I noticed that today's rainfall of 1.01 inches brought my monthly total to 8.67 inches, I got to wondering just where that stands in my climatology. After quickly running through all my data, I found that this July is the fifth wettest month in my records since December, 2001. The highest rainfall values recorded here include:
13.29" in May, 2003
11.41" in November, 2004
9.48" in September, 2002
9.41" in June, 2003
8.67" in July, 2005 [so far]
Okay, my period of record is pretty short. So I decided to use the climate query found via the Birmingham National Weather Service web site. After all, the climate data for Birmingham goes back into the late 1800s, so that ought to give me a better idea of how wet my July value is.
It turns out that my July rain total of 8.67 inches would tie the 101st wettest month ever recorded at the official observing site. 101st out of about 1315 monthly observations means that my value is actually in the top 8 percent of wettest months for central Alabama.
And we still have ten days in this month to record even more rain! Pretty wet, huh?
-Brian-