Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,076,059 times
Reputation: 11862
Advertisements
Arica is the driest city of note in the world (there are drier places nearby). According to wikipedia averaging just 0.8 mm a year. It can go many years without rain, although like much of the coastline in that part of the world cloud cover and humidity is high, often in the form of coastal fog. Without digging up detailed stats I can't be sure of other stats like wind speed, but temperatures appear comfortable, but very cool for it's latitude.
Mount Waialeale, while probably not the wettest place in the world (that title is still disputed) is probably one of the places which is the most consistently wet year round, and if the '335-360' raindays a year are to believed, could probably 'feel' the wettest out of all the other contenders (e.g. Mawsynram, India or Lloro, Colombia). Temperatures are mild to warm, lows in the teens and highs in the mid to high 20s range year round.
While it's extremely dry, and gets distinctly cooler, I don't think I could handle rain almost every day so I would pick Arica.
I voted for.... well you'll have to guess. Do I like warmth enough to take the incredible rains of Mount Waialeale, or do I like settled dry sunny weather enough to take the more mediocre temperatures of Arica? For me to know and you to wonder.
Arica. I don't like dry climates, but Waialeale has too much rain on too many days. I've spent time in a place with high rainfall, and half the rainfall days of Waialeale, and it was bad enough.
Mt Waialeale's claim to wettest location is certainly wrong. Apart from places in Colombia and elsewhere which are known to be wetter, there are other regions where no gauges are currently installed. The Cleddau valley west of Milford Sound is estimated to average at least 13,600 mm/year, with higher values than that windward of the Southern Alps, possibly as high as 16,000mm/year.
Arica is a pleasant city, and the coastal humidity makes it feel warmer than the numbers suggest. Sunshine is reasonable at about 2300 hours - a lot of the thin morning clouds are insufficient to diminish the sun's brightness much at all, at least away from "winter", as we found out one April.
Claims persist about parts of the Atacama having no record of rainfall falling, but there are no gauges to support such claims yet. Quillaga inland from Antofagasta had a 30+ year span with only about 0.3mm/year, from memory.
In the last decade Arica has blotted its copybook with a couple of instances of over 5mm. I have data for a few locations from 1996 - Arica has averaged 1.7mm despite 8 rainless years, whereas Iquique has averaged only 0.6mm despite getting over 9mm in 2002, thanks to only 0.7mm in total in the other 15 years! For the same period Antofagasta has averaged 1.7mm and Calama 3.9mm.
Arica used to lie in a corridor to the sea as part of Bolivia, but Chile's acquisition of it after a 19th century conflict that country's Armada (Navy) now has a sign on Titicaca advertising its existence!
Arica - Sunshine is tolerable and temperatures aren't unbearable.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
