How much rain in Seattle this week? Millions of tanker trucks' worth
We all know Seattle gets a lot of rain, but have you ever thought of just much water really falls in a big rainstorm?
Local engineer Dale Smith had the burning question pop into his head when he read about a statistic that says our "Pineapple Express" type rain storms transports an amount of water vapor equal to between 7.5 to 15 times the average flow of liquid water out of the Mississippi River.
His quest: How many tanker trucks would it take to haul enough water to cover all of King County with 1 inch of rain -- roughly the amount of total rain expected in the Seattle area through the weekend.
(Start formulating your guesses now)
10,000? A million? A billion?
For his base, he's using the double tankers that you see filling up gas stations -- those carry 8,000 gallons of liquid.
King County is 2,307 square miles, which translates to just over 9 trillion square inches. (9.261 trillion to be fairly exact).
Now that we know how much land we need to cover, we need the water. One U.S. Gallon is 231 cubic inches -- a cubic inch of water on a square inch of land would cover that parcel with 1" of water.
So take 8,000 gallons of water in one truck, multiply by 231 and we find each tanker can carry 1,848,000 cubic inches of water.
Thus, just how many trucks would it take to cover King County with 1" of rain?!?!
Just over 5 million! (5,011,595. Or just call it 5 million and leave a few driveways dry.)
Smith says King County has about 2 million people, so every person -- even the kids -- would have to make 2.5 trips to Puget Sound or the ocean to fill a truck and bring it back.
But what about covering all of Western Washington? The rain doesn't just stop on the county lines, you know!
That is 96.348 trillion square inches, and would take 52.1 million trucks, or about 10 trucks per person. Think of the amount of tanker trucks we'd need to supply the gas for all our water trucks!
Instead, it's provided for free by Mother Nature.
This will be a very boring neutral winter season and one way you can tell is by the way it's been so far this fall really BORING, so i have no hope of a exciting winter ahead. oh well thats the it goes i guess.
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 @DaveP I do smile every single day because idiots like you don't live near me anymore. :)
That cover picture sums up Seattle, raining but sunny.
I think the thing that people who consider moving up here, don't realize.. is that the rain in Seattle may be 38" in one year, and it doesn't look like much compared to other US cities. Â But.. the rain is usually spread out over 8 months.. one drip at a time. Â yes, we get these crazy wet storms, but it's the constant dark, gray, drizzle, that drives you insane. Â Anyone considering moving here should rent, not buy, for the first few years.... Â only then can you know if you can handle the dark skies.Â
Seattle's average annual rainfall is only 38 inches, placing Seattle 44th among major U.S cities in annual rainfall. Â (I'm assuming that includes snowfall calculated as rainfall where applicable.) Â Â
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Here in Aberdeen, we average 84 inches annual rainfall. Â It doesn't rain more often here, of course, but we get drenching downpours as storms come ashore, not the light rain in Seattle, which is partly the result of the very heavy rains on the western slope of the Olympics (up to 200 inches a year in the Hoh Rain Forest. Â
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Can it get really cold and have some snow please! I would like truck loads of SNOW!
 @DDG One thing I like about the northwest: I don't have to shovel rain.
Must be a slow news day. Although it is fun to speculate about these things. People who don't live here think it rains all the time. Let them think so. But just for comparison, Ketchikan gets 197 inches of rain per year. We don't come close to that. Hawaii gets more rain than we do.Â
 @Rreeves1960 Umm.. it DOES rain all the time.  Well, actually it drizzles all the time.  Frankly, there are only like 89 days of sun here all year, and the rest of the time is gray and drizzly.  I would take more actual rain + sunny days, than 38" of rain spread out over 8 months or so.  There is a reason they have the term "June-uary" And this year it was "July-uary." lol
 @Rreeves1960 But..... No other city in the continental US rains more often than Seattle.
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 @greenecho  @Rreeves1960 Bingo!!! Â
....once again, wish it was all SNOW !! Love to see & hear all the fear of the wimpy-asss drivers of this region.
I'm moist.
 @Erxkeel Wow.  had to laugh when i saw this....  The worst word ever!!!
@Erxkeel  Thank you.
 @Erxkeel  not really sure if we needed to know that..... :-))
Ahhh, fun with math. Not even going to 'fact check' this one and just with the notion it'll be Really Da*n Wet.