Thursday, January 23, 2020

2019 Rainfall By the Numbers

Each year we track certain things like rainfall.  In early January we sum up the totals and calculate rainfall here at our little family farm.  We have a rain gauge out by the garden right next to the cow's water trough.  Every day after a rain I dump the water out and record the precipitation on a paper log in the utility room.

Here are the statistics from 2019.  As you can tell, March was the month in 2019 that had the least amount of rainfall with 1.1 inches and May was the month in 2019 with the most rainfall at 12.05 inches.  For the year we had a total of 64.6 inches of rain.  If you do a search to see the average rainfall in our zip code, it shows 60.35 inches.  We are once again over the average rainfall for 2019.


Why do we do this?  I guess curiosity.  But I also like to see trends.  We began tracking rain back in 2013, so we have seven years of data.  From this data we gather some neat information.


First, our average rainfall at our farm is almost 68 inches or 5.66 feet over the past seven years.  The highest rainfall totals were from back in 2017 with 79.9 inches and the lowest in 2012 with 58.15 inches.  It is kind of neat to see that over the last seven years, we have gotten right at 40 feet of rainfall.  That's a lot of water!

In 2019, the month with the lowest rainfall was March at 1.1 inches in total and the highest was May with 12.05 inches in total.  Over the last seven years, the driest month has been March, averaging 3.03 inches, and the wettest has been August, averaging 9.67 inches of rainfall.  Torrential rains in August 2016 leaving almost 26 inches of rain on the ground, skews the data though.

One other thing to see that was interesting is that there were three days of the month FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR that it never rained.  It never rained a drop on the first day of every month, the 9th day and the 11th day.  Meaningless information, I know, but it is fun to track and see. 

We're already tracking rainfall for 2020 and on the 23rd day of the month, we've already surpassed every year except 2013 in rainfall total and still have a week to go!

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