Vermont Public, the local Nancy Pelosi Radio (NPR) online affiliate (maybe gang is a better term), has a bit about the rain in the state capital of Montpelier. “Montpelier sets rainfall record for July.”
Related: “The Once in a Century Floods Which Happen Every 10-20 Years.”
Vermont’s capital city broke a new record this month for rainfall, the National Weather Service reports.
Montpelier saw more than a foot of rain during the month of July. That’s a lot more than the prior record of 8 inches in 2008. The data goes back to the middle of the last century.
Vermont sees on average 6 more inches of precipitation every year than it did in the 1960s.
The Green Mountain State was whacked for certain, and it may well be a record for Montpelier, but what about that last bit? An average of six more inches of precipitation (on average) since the 1960s? Am I going to have to search out all the articles on drought for the past fifty years? I could, but there’s no need.
First, the author quotes NOAA from a Vermont-specific site that says, quote, “Annual average precipitation has increased nearly 6 inches since the 1960s.” So she’s off the hook, but NOAA isn’t. Their state-level time series data does not support that statement.
The average statewide precipitation from 1895 to 1969 is 40.46 inches. From 1970 to 2022, it is 45.48 inches. That’s 5.02″ inches. It is not nearly six. It is barely five. And I accept that I may be nitpicking, but wait – there’s more. Over the past ten years, from 2012 to 2022, the annual average rainfall has declined nearly 1.25 inches to 44.23. That is only 3.77 inches above the 1895-1969 average.
Nitpicking? Not quite four sounds a lot less intimidating than nearly six, and what if that was someone’s pronoun? You wouldn’t want to get that wrong.
This year will very likely change that number, but a decade of fewer annual inches seems important to me. The same sort of importance should apply to the absence of catastrophic sea level rise on the New Hampshire coast over the same period. It is flat or declining over the past decade, as is the media response.
It’s going the wrong way, so there’s nothing to report. Oh, look – rain!
By the way, a search of Newspapers.com for Vermont + Drought from 2000 to 2023 produced 10,275 hits. That includes the Burlington Free Press, the Rutland Daily Herald, The Brattleboro Reformer, Bennington Banner, and five other “newspapers” in the state.
If we expand the search back to 1970, there are nearly 29,179 hits.
What a popular subject for a state with all that extra precipitation. And no, I don’t think they were writing about the absence of drought.
