Seattle is more 'grey' than rainy. Which means things don't dry out, and it's really rough on Vitamin D levels. But not necessarily a lot of actual precipitation.

The Olympic or Cascade Mountain Ranges that roughly bracket Seattle get most of the actual precipitation. Even Snoqualmie which is right next to Seattle but a little higher gets ~ double the actual precipitation. Snoqualmie Pass (only ~ 3000 ft) nearby gets ~ 100 inches of precipitation, and 400 inches of snow on an average year.

> Wikipedia says that it rains 39.34 inches annually in Seattle. Is that a lot?

The precipitation in seattle (mist) and the precipitation in nyc ( rain ) are two different animals. For example, pretty much everyone in nyc owns an umbrella. Pretty much nobody in seattle owns an umbrella. Why would that be if it 'rains' more in seattle?

It's probably true that seattle gets more precipitation because it's constantly misty for 6 or 7 months. You can go weeks without seeing the sun in seattle. In nyc, the precipitation is mostly in the form of actual rain and downpours. You can dumped on and the clouds clear. Maybe a system will bring downpours for a couple of days. But it always clears. You rarely get dumped on in seattle and if so, for a short time frame. And the skies never clear. It just remains and annoys you with mist.

> Seattle has 156.2 rainy days.

Nope. Not rainy days. Maybe 6 rainy days and 150 misty days.

In the northeast, you can actual weather. In the west coast, it's flimsy weather. I've no other word to describe it. People who experienced both will get what I'm trying to say.

As the other responses note, I'd say it doesn't rain that much here. Now, oddly, it often looks like it has rained for far longer. And, in general, our rain season is the dark season, which sucks for other reasons.

Rain in the PNW tends to be via a high number of days with very low-intensity rainfall. Grey, drizzly days are common but downpours are relatively rare.

That's suspiciously close to 1m.

Which sounds like a lot to me, but who knows.

Hi from Seattle. It's currently raining, and I wish I'd left my jacket at home. We get an almost constant drizzle of wet in winter.

Once or twice a year, it'll rain for 48 hours straight and dump three inches of water on us, but the rest of the time, it's like unpleasantly heavy fog

That is 1m a year. Which is like 3mm a day (if it rained every day) but really Seattle gets that over about 9 months. Which is like 4 or 5mm a day.