Homeless in Vancouver: The sun beams on Vancouver

According to the Web, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, only gets 13 more days of sun a year than Vancouver. We average 1,938 annual hours a year. Rio De Janeiro averages 2,250 hours. And yes, I was looking up Vancouver, British Columbia, not Vancouver, Chile.

Vancouver has a well-earned reputation for being rain-soaked and cloud-covered. And it’s true, we get a lot of wet, overcast days, but we also now get a lot more sunny days than I remember experiencing in the 1980s. By the early in the 21st century, Vancouver started to getting used to weeks of consecutive sunshine in the summer.

I picture Rio De Janeiro as being relentlessly sunny. Silly me. Wikipedia says Rio has a tropical savannah climate bordering on a tropical monsoon climate.

Rio has an average annual rainfall of 1,065 millimetres, not far behind Vancouver’s average: 1,457 millimetres.

What about my idea we’re getting less rain?

That idea does hold water—barely. According to the handy graphing the Weather Channel has done with Environment Canada data, it’s easy to see that Vancouver’s annual precipitation has slightly declined over the last 25 years.

Vancouver recorded 1,082.30 mm of rain in 1989, which is in line with recent years, but annual rainfall climbed—interrupted by 1993's very low 837 mm—to a high of 1,521.80 mm in 1997.

Last year, we had lower-than-average rain but still over 100 mm more than 1993. Pattern hunters will note the lows in near 10-year increments: 1993: 837; 2002: 857.60; and 2013: 943.50. 

Click the images to enlarge them.