Life of a Lab Rat

It's been rather damp in Sydney for the last week. And of course the locals say to me,

"Hur hur, it must feel like home with all this rain!"

So I point out that, actually, Sydney gets more rain than I'm used to.

Seriously. The thirty year mean annual rainfall in Cambridge (UK. What? There's another one?) is ~550 mm (source). On average it rains on 106 days a year. In Sydney the annual rainfall, averaged over 150 years (look, when you don't have much recorded history you make the most of it) is ~1200 mm (source). That's over twice as much. And the number of rainy days per year? An even hundred.

Same number of rainy days, twice as much rain. Now tell me it should remind me of home.

Just for comparison, I checked the annual figures for Manchester (806 mm), Oxford (642 mm), Auckland (1150 mm), Canterbury Plains (the driest place in New Zealand: 635 mm), Jerusalem (660 mm) and New York (1140 mm).

The interesting difference is that Sydney has 50% more sunshine hours than Cambridge. So when it's cloudy in Cambridge, it might not rain — or it might snow. In Sydney clouds mean rain. And an imperial shedload of it.