When it’s raining, it seems like that’s all we can bring ourselves to talk about. How much it’s raining. How long it’s been raining for. How much longer we think it’s going to be raining. And while we might think our city is the only one that ever gets a couple days of bad weather in a row, there are some cities out there that have a lot more rain than we do. Unless you live in the following cities, in which case, our condolences.
We’re talking about the US cities that receive the highest amount of precipitation. So other cities might have more rainy days, but these are the eight cities that experience the most water falling from the sky.
Houston, Texas
49.8 Inches Per Year
The common image of Texas for most is probably a dusty grassland. That’s true for at least some areas of the state, as it wouldn’t be the case if it wasn’t at least partially true, but areas of Texas get enough rain that it can qualify as one of the United States’ rainiest cities. We’re not sure what good that does for the drier parts of the state, but at least Houston isn’t thirsty.
New York, New York
49.9 Inches Per Year
The craziest weather we hear New Yorkers talking about is the tendency for the city to either be insanely hot or insanely cold. But apparently the one that doesn’t get a proper amount of attention is the sheer volume of rain that New York City receives. It’s a wonder more people aren’t swimming to their Midtown jobs, considering the subway lines are all well below the water line.
Orlando, Florida
50.7 Inches Per Year
Orlando’s qualification for windiest city makes a lot of sense. If you’ve ever been stuck in a Florida rain storm, you know what we mean. For those of you who don’t, what we’re saying is these things come out of nowhere, dump gallons of water all over the place and disappear within a half an hour. And that’s not even counting the copious amounts of rain hurricanes drop on the state. It’s a wonder Disney World can manage to keep its doors open.
Jacksonville, Florida
52.4 Inches Per Year
A lot of what we just said about Orlando applies here. If it helps to put this kind of rainfall in perspective, imagine Jason from The Good Place constantly submerged up to his chest in water. Come to think of it, the way that show’s going, we wouldn’t put it past them to give something like that a shot. At the very least and forgoing pop culture references, let’s hope that the Jaguars get a dry year at some point. Maybe that will help their chances.
Memphis, Tennessee
53.7 Inches Per Year
Imagining Graceland in the rain has to be one of the saddest images that’s popped into our brain recently. The good thing is that rain only increases our tendency to stay inside venues listening to live music, which means good things for Elvis’s final resting place and great things for bands getting their start in Memphis.
Birmingham, Alabama
53.7 Inches Per Year
It’s almost a guarantee that future movies about Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts in Alabama are going to be dramatized, most likely using rain. It’s a cheap tactic, but we can definitely see it happening. The only comfort in it might be the fact that including rain could be historically inaccurate, but at least it won’t be regionally inaccurate.
Miami, Florida
61.9 Inches Per Year
It’s probably not a surprise that Florida was on this list so many times. We’ve heard its weather talked about a bit more than the weather in other states, which sounds like a weird sentence until you consider the kind of weather Floridians have to deal with. We talked about surprise rain showers and hurricanes, but what we didn’t emphasize is the size of the raindrops down there. These things are the size of ping pong balls, which is only a minor exaggeration.
New Orleans, Louisiana
62.7 Inches Per Year
New Orleans tops the list, which shouldn’t shock anyone. The city’s had a ton of problems with water management (that’s not a backhanded dig about Katrina, it’s a documented fact), with the problems caused by its annual rainfall and below-sea-level existence. The fact is, it’s hard to handle the water falling on your city when the water outside your city is also constantly fighting to get in.