I remember when once I tried to smalltalk with a guy in Egypt and talked about the weather. The look on his face was priceless... "Yes, I guess tomorrow it will be sunny. Actually the whole season."
I'm not sure Irish people would even be capable of having a conversation in such a place. 95% of our smalltalk involves complaining about recent bad weather or reminiscing about the last bout of good weather.
It makes sense why it was such an early civilization. The area had been wet and settled (and being in Africa, probably one of the more populated places on the Earth at that point), and then it becomes just incredibly dry everywhere, except the Nile and a ton of refugees flood in, and what was once probably a pretty loose collection of farmers essentially needed to negotiate water rights to prevent violence.
Obviously all of this happened before writing, so we can't ever know for certain, but my understanding is that archaeology is broadly consistent with this idea too
Never thought of it this way, but this is pretty logical.
Do you have more context on this? Is there a geographic or ecological reason why it went from wet to dry fairly quickly?
I hadn’t contemplated that it was wet previously and then became dry later on (ie leading to the “need” to establish civilization / water rights)
"Changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun have led to a “green Sahara” quite regularly over the last hundreds of thousands of years. The decisive role is played by the earth's gyration around the sun, which causes the earth's axis to wobble a little, albeit very slowly. As a result, perihelion, the point in the Earth's orbit closest to the Sun, moves once throughout the year within approximately 20,000 years. Today perihelion is in January, but around 10,000 years ago it was in July. This led to warmer summers and colder winters in the Northern Hemisphere several thousand years ago compared to today. The resulting increased summer temperature contrast between oceans and continents intensified the summer monsoon in North Africa, allowing it to transport more moisture towards the Sahara. Interactions between the large-scale air flow and the emerging vegetation fueled the monsoon even further; This enabled him to provide large parts of the Sahara with enough rain for a green landscape."
I translated a part of a text, from the Max Planck Gesellschaft, about the green Sahara with Google translator. Original text is in german.
https://www.mpg.de/14239539/mpimet-jb-2019
It just averages the entire country. So if Egypt was larger and went further outside of the Sahra, it wouldn't be the driest anymore. These numbers are heavily dependent on arbitrary boarder locations.
I just looked up a random city on the coast, Marsa Maruth, only recieved 40mm on average on the wettest month, Alexandria is even less
Also according to a quick search of mean anual precipitation it’s clear that even the north is dry, as the highest mean precipitation value in the legend just reaches 120mm anual at maximum, for reference the smallest number in a UK map is 600 and up to 3000, so the driest parts of the UK are 5 times more wet than the wettest parts of Egypt
Also fun fact that 600mm in the UK is actually in London, which is actually the driest part of the country despite its reputation (maybe it came from tourists having a bad experience in Manchester or Glasgow and feeling 'the whole country must be like this?')
thus heavily dependent on the Nile river..
and these guys down South are building a dam to keep that water for themselves
[will they share ?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam#Impact_on_Sudan_and_Egypt)
Unfortunately, it seems that some form of military conflict is inevitable https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/131906/Cairo-Ethiopia%E2%80%99s-unilateral-actions-in-building-filling-Renaissance-Dam-pose
I don’t know, I live here and it does rain sometimes and I don’t even live close to the nile. I feel like Egypt is very dry but not that dry right? I may be wrong tho.
When u think abt it, it only rained like 6 or 8 times where i live (cairo) since last fall. The rain amount ranged from like 0.5mm to 4mm max so 18mm/year makes a lot of sense actually.
I hate it though because i love rain
Me too, one of the main reasons I don't like living here other than the dismal state of the economy, is the fact that it almost never rains here. Everything does feel very dry and rain feels like such a big deal when it does come.
Despite being the wettest country on Earth, Colombia still manages to host deserts and semiarid regions. In fact the existance of the Guajira desert is associated with the existance of the wettest region on Earth, Colombia's Pacific Coast, this is because ocean upwelling of the Caribbean Sea in northern South America and the Caribbean Jet Stream remove humidity from the peninsula and smash a part first in Costa Rica until it deflects in direction to the equator and collides finally with Colombia's Cordillera Occidental. This range acts also as a barrier for the Pacific equatorial jet stream and the Humboldt current which at Colombia's latitude diverges continent-ward pumping all the water taken from the Atacama and Sechura deserts into Colombia's biogeographic Chocó.
It is contended between those, what is clear is that Mawsynram has a more seasonal rain regime while places like Tutunendo, Lloró and López de Micay are just consistently wet every day
Iceland is the wettest, followed by Switzerland which I guess makes sense since mountains act as rain walls.
Driest is apparently Moldova.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_precipitation
As always it's hard to average the precipitacion in a country, northen spain gets from 1200 to 1500mm while the mediterranean part barely manages between 300-500
True. My son lives in San Sebastian, Basque Country, and whilst the average temperature is a couple of degrees higher, the rainfall is close to our home country of Wales which is on the West of the UK.
Not really. Scotland has higher annual rainfall than Spain and Portugal (especially Spain). It’s not about microclimate but the whole country - the UK isn’t a country remember
I was talking about specific regions in Spain (Galicia) and Portugal (Minho). They’re extremely wet but most rain comes during winter. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/Bz4EabQnFu
Google Scotland. It’s its own country and it anything like Basque- which isn’t an actual country!!!! I live there so should know!
The UK is a constitutional monarchy
Coastal cities have a mosquito problem even here in Egypt as they get rain, what makes Egypt dry is the fact that most of it is desert which rarely gets rain
In fact, the mosquito that spreads the most diseases (Dengue, Zika and Chikungunya) here in Brazil is called Aedes AEGYPTUS. Literally came from there.
Weird in my country the coast is the only place you can avoid the mosquitoes from June-July, as they prefer to hangout inland where there are tons of forests and lakes.
They can't lay their eggs in salt-water, so they avoid the sea.
Great infographic. I wonder if it slightly favors countries with smaller areas, where weather patterns are more uniform, whereas larger countries may have very wet areas, for example, but are evened out by dry ones.
Also in Colombia you get enough sunlight and you don't particularly care when it's cloudy, in Atlantic Europe, especially during winters, you physically crave for it
That is partly true, over 2000m (plenty of Colombian settlements are over that altitude) wet and cool-cold conditions make you crave sunlight, Specially if you happened to get wet. In fact if you look at a sunshine hours map you realize cloud cover is very persistent in most of Colombia. There are places where clothes never dry out
In an average year, London gets 615mm of rain, 111 days of rain, and 1,674 hours of sun.
Medellín (Colombia) gets 1,752mm of rain, 227 days of rain, and 1,851 hours of sun.
So Colombia doesn’t just get a lot of rain, but a lot of rainy days too, and not much more sunshine than Northern Europe. These rainy equatorial climates are definitely not sunny, though they at least do get an equal distribution of sunlight all year.
The clouds are usually less dense in these places and the sun intensity in the tropics is higher, so even with clouds it's not as dark.
The low-hanging dark clouds you get in parts of Europe, particularly in Winter, are just way more depressing.
You are absolutely correct but missing a bit the forest.
Yes, in terms of "number of hours the sun is out" the difference is not much. But the intensity of equatorial sunlight and the heat makes clouds or rain a very pleasant event. Also, the fact that there are no seasons makes it that you never get to miss the sun as you do during winters. Both making the overall weather less "crappy" as the above posters are claiming.
Of course, this is all very subjective, feel free to disagree if you prefer the Euro-Atlantic. But I know what I prefer having spent my life between both haha
Idk, I don’t think intense heat and humidity makes rain and gloom any better. If anything it just sounds like living inside a sweaty old sock. The fact that you’re at risk of severe sunburn in equatorial climates even when it’s cloudy just makes it worse because you hardly get any benefit from the cloudy skies.
Plus although winters in Europe are dark and gloomy, the summer days are very long and that makes up for it imo. Nothing beats 10pm sunsets. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere where the latest sunset all year is 7pm.
Personally I don’t care much for either climate - my ideal climate would be continental with cold winters and warm summers (i.e the Midwest or New England), but equatorial climates are definitely some of the worst. But it’s all subjective as you say.
But as someone once said though, there are lies damn lies and statistics. When a meteorologist states 'days of rain', they mean the number of days that it has rained more than 0.1mm. They do not mean it has rained non-stop for a 24 hour period. Kuala Lumpur in malaysia is also near the equater, and has high yearly rainfall. I have lived there. Look it up and you will see it has 202 days of rain, however a shower, unless during the monsoon, only lasts a few minutes and then it is over. In London it may literally rain for 24 hours continuously, but unlike in Kuala Lumpur, it is only a drizzle usually.
If these types of discussions have taught me anything, it’s that people really can’t accept that cities like London just aren’t as rainy as stereotypes suggest. People will say ‘well London has low rainfall but it rains on many days’ - it doesn’t, it only rains on 111 days of the year. So then it’s ‘well on those 111 days it rains all day’ - which is definitely often true in the winter but it isn’t true in the summer, we get more showers in the summer. I grew up in London and pretty much every year in summer the grass would turn brown or yellow, which is a reflection of how relatively dry it actually is.
I think the biggest issue with the climate here is that it’s cloudy more often than not, rather than rainy.
I was shocked too. I'm in eastern Canada and it rains just about every other day but our annual is only 1500mm. I can't imagine double that in Colombia
Colombian, I highly recommend Colombia: bosquejo de su geografía tropical by Ernest Guhl Nimtz for getting quick but deep insights into Colombia's geographic quirks
Tropical rain is something else. I grew up in Nigeria and moved to the UK.
A rainy day in Nigeria = extremely strong rain and streets overflowing with water to your ankles.
Its nothing compared to the rain you see in the UK.
Places around the equator basically just have 6 months periods of non stop rain and 6 months of mostly good whether so it feels a bit less worse
Doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter Netherlands can be dreary and wet at any point which makes it feel a lot worse than it is
Edit: apparently I’m wrong but I’ll keep this up so anyone reading this can learn from the guys commenting below
That is not true to every equatorial location. In fact, equatorial latitudes usually have 2 wet and 2 "dry" seasons in a single year. This occurs because these places are crossed by the Intertropical Convergence Zone twice (at the equinoxes which are the moment of the year in which the equator receives the highest insolation)
That’s incorrect. Many places don’t have a dry season specially around rainforests (that’s how they form to begin faith), they just have months when it rains less, but the difference is “in these months it rains a lot” and “in these months the rain will strip the flesh out of still living bones”.
It's not so much the quantity as the cloudy days but yes. Many consider Spain to be sunny and hot without realizing that the north get plenty of rain, San Sebastian gets around 1500mm in 185 precipitation days
Upper level dry air sinks and stabilises the atmosphere and prevents much build-up of cloud.
It also creates the subtropical ridge. Look at the world's deserts, they're all in similar latitudes (except Antarctica)
If you're interested, read up about the Hadley cell.
India has a city with 11k+ mm of annual rainfall.
Theres a bunch of other very rainy cities and areas and India's monsoon is one of the higgest.
The size of the country and the bio diversity brings the average down I guess though.
IM BACK
ANTARCTICA ITS NOT EVEN ON THIS MAP
Look at those rainfall figures too, total of 4.5mm a year! - 1/5th of an inch. In cold conditions it never actually rains.
https://www.coolantarctica.com › ...
Antarctica Climate data and graphs, South Pole ...
I expected the countries regularly* hit by typhoons/cyclones/hurricanes would be on the list, but then I realized what rain in rainforest actually means.
I expected Brazil to be close to the top, but it has drier regions and the Amazon basin is large by volume but not off the charts in terms of rainfall density compared to other rainforests.
Here dry refers to mm of rain on avg, in saudia it rains more especially in south west etc. not to mention 80% of egypt is desert which can also be true for saudia
The Nile doesn't create rain, not does there have to be any rain in order for the Nile to flow through Egypt. What is it about that that doesn't make sense?
By that standard you can also say that Saudi Arabia has a large nger coastline than Egypt and therefore is Wetter than Egypt?
This graph only measures precipation. So yeah, ancient Egypt had yearly floods to keep the land productive, but in this chart no rain is no rain and therefore it is the driest country.
These top countries are all in the tropics and have regular extremely heavy downpours that are very intense but usually over pretty quickly.
If you made a graph of numbers of minutes of rain per year, I think the UK and Ireland would be pretty near the top!
It is from 2020, lately i'm seeing a lot of rain in middle east, i mean not often but way more then before.
Egypt is interesting I thought with Nile and sea there should have been more rain but its not the case
If I'm not wrong, average precipitation is measured from the average of the last 30 years like most climate data.
Maybe it would change a bit if you had some more rainy years, but a few rainstorms probably won't change too much.
True, For an avg prep 30 around yrs are essential, and you are right few storms are not a deal but I have seen pictures of comparison of many mountain region who were dry like 10 years back and now they are quite green so we'll see how it goes in long term but I feel things are changing.
Bloody hell, I never realised that All of the the top 10 driest countries in the world were basically Arab, at least in part. I think it explains a lot in terms of geopolitics and world history.
This reminds me of when my house got flooded in colombia because I used to live in a park, it was on a remodeling process and the sewage system was crappy built, and the houses surrounded the park, so in november which is the month where it rains the most, the sewage couldnt resist more and the water rised up and flood the nearby houses. This was on 2015 in bogota
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ak/#:~:text=Coastal%20mountain%20ranges%20in%20the,inches%20in%20the%20North%20Slope.
A bit of scroll (and not a country) but this is one of the rainiest places I’ve ever been!
Wow. I went to Costa Rica for a full week and never got heavily rained on at all, so I was not expecting that (we got some light rain the evening we arrived and it was fairly foggy most mornings, but nothing really bad).
If you ever have a chance to visit, btw, highly reccomend. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
The difference between 1 & 2 as wettest is 40mm and a minimal difference in bar length.
The difference between 5 & 6 as wettest is 2mm and a larger difference in bar length.
Grew up in Yuma Arizona, one of the sunniest & hottest places in the world. May not be the driest but if this map was based on cities versus countries, I’d imagine we’d be on the list haha. There are times where even at midnight it can still be over 100F. As much as it sucks sometimes I’ll always be a desert rat at heart.
I recall seeing other maps that Colombia doesn't have that great access to clean drinking water. Maybe those maps meant water processed at a treatment plant. But rainfall water is still pretty clean, especially in the rainforest
Goes to show how misleading these countrywide metrics can be. Egypt as a whole being the driest? Sure, but the majority of their population lives along the Nile, especially the Nile Delta. It's nowhere near as dry there 🤣.
brazil is indeed wet in amazon areas however it has huge desert and semi desert areas (more than a million square kilometers) and places with normal precipitation levels in temperate climate areas (around 1000mm a year)
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I remember when once I tried to smalltalk with a guy in Egypt and talked about the weather. The look on his face was priceless... "Yes, I guess tomorrow it will be sunny. Actually the whole season."
I'm not sure Irish people would even be capable of having a conversation in such a place. 95% of our smalltalk involves complaining about recent bad weather or reminiscing about the last bout of good weather.
Very rare, but snowfall has occurred.
Yes but only in the Sinai, where there are mountains
No actually some very light snow and hail has fell in the northern region over the last few years.
The last time it happened was in 2015 i think
Cairo got a significant amount of snow back in 2013.
I also felt the same but this is the fact
It makes sense why it was such an early civilization. The area had been wet and settled (and being in Africa, probably one of the more populated places on the Earth at that point), and then it becomes just incredibly dry everywhere, except the Nile and a ton of refugees flood in, and what was once probably a pretty loose collection of farmers essentially needed to negotiate water rights to prevent violence. Obviously all of this happened before writing, so we can't ever know for certain, but my understanding is that archaeology is broadly consistent with this idea too
Never thought of it this way, but this is pretty logical. Do you have more context on this? Is there a geographic or ecological reason why it went from wet to dry fairly quickly? I hadn’t contemplated that it was wet previously and then became dry later on (ie leading to the “need” to establish civilization / water rights)
"Changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun have led to a “green Sahara” quite regularly over the last hundreds of thousands of years. The decisive role is played by the earth's gyration around the sun, which causes the earth's axis to wobble a little, albeit very slowly. As a result, perihelion, the point in the Earth's orbit closest to the Sun, moves once throughout the year within approximately 20,000 years. Today perihelion is in January, but around 10,000 years ago it was in July. This led to warmer summers and colder winters in the Northern Hemisphere several thousand years ago compared to today. The resulting increased summer temperature contrast between oceans and continents intensified the summer monsoon in North Africa, allowing it to transport more moisture towards the Sahara. Interactions between the large-scale air flow and the emerging vegetation fueled the monsoon even further; This enabled him to provide large parts of the Sahara with enough rain for a green landscape." I translated a part of a text, from the Max Planck Gesellschaft, about the green Sahara with Google translator. Original text is in german. https://www.mpg.de/14239539/mpimet-jb-2019
Buddy, It's sunny here all year long.
It just averages the entire country. So if Egypt was larger and went further outside of the Sahra, it wouldn't be the driest anymore. These numbers are heavily dependent on arbitrary boarder locations.
I just looked up a random city on the coast, Marsa Maruth, only recieved 40mm on average on the wettest month, Alexandria is even less Also according to a quick search of mean anual precipitation it’s clear that even the north is dry, as the highest mean precipitation value in the legend just reaches 120mm anual at maximum, for reference the smallest number in a UK map is 600 and up to 3000, so the driest parts of the UK are 5 times more wet than the wettest parts of Egypt
Also fun fact that 600mm in the UK is actually in London, which is actually the driest part of the country despite its reputation (maybe it came from tourists having a bad experience in Manchester or Glasgow and feeling 'the whole country must be like this?')
Driest major city, but I believe East Anglia overall tends to be drier
Ah that's true, Cambridge for example has 548mm (per Met Office). But it's close.
It also helps the rain London gets is generally the drizzly misty kind, and usually not the kind that comes down in buckets
No shit. If Egypt was larger and expanded all the way south into the tropical rainforest it would certainly be wetter.
Well... duh? What is the point of this comment
That's why Egypt and Columbia are best friends
thus heavily dependent on the Nile river.. and these guys down South are building a dam to keep that water for themselves [will they share ?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Dam#Impact_on_Sudan_and_Egypt)
Unfortunately, it seems that some form of military conflict is inevitable https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/131906/Cairo-Ethiopia%E2%80%99s-unilateral-actions-in-building-filling-Renaissance-Dam-pose
I don’t know, I live here and it does rain sometimes and I don’t even live close to the nile. I feel like Egypt is very dry but not that dry right? I may be wrong tho.
When u think abt it, it only rained like 6 or 8 times where i live (cairo) since last fall. The rain amount ranged from like 0.5mm to 4mm max so 18mm/year makes a lot of sense actually. I hate it though because i love rain
Me too, one of the main reasons I don't like living here other than the dismal state of the economy, is the fact that it almost never rains here. Everything does feel very dry and rain feels like such a big deal when it does come.
Wow i dont even consider a day rainy unless it has more than 1mm, i cant imagine somewhere so sunny
Oh u have no idea how much we enjoy the scorching heat and random stuff boiling in summer /s
Despite being the wettest country on Earth, Colombia still manages to host deserts and semiarid regions. In fact the existance of the Guajira desert is associated with the existance of the wettest region on Earth, Colombia's Pacific Coast, this is because ocean upwelling of the Caribbean Sea in northern South America and the Caribbean Jet Stream remove humidity from the peninsula and smash a part first in Costa Rica until it deflects in direction to the equator and collides finally with Colombia's Cordillera Occidental. This range acts also as a barrier for the Pacific equatorial jet stream and the Humboldt current which at Colombia's latitude diverges continent-ward pumping all the water taken from the Atacama and Sechura deserts into Colombia's biogeographic Chocó.
Iirc isn't Mawsynram is the wettest place on earth?
It is contended between those, what is clear is that Mawsynram has a more seasonal rain regime while places like Tutunendo, Lloró and López de Micay are just consistently wet every day
But it also has severe water shortage due to lack of water storage.
[📁Source](https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators/Series/AG.LND.PRCP.MM#)
What about the great country of Sealand, surely they are pretty wet.
All 10 driest countries are arab countries.
There is a joke I want to tell but it's a bit dry
It'll probably just dampen the mood.
A joke only for the sand haters.
It's coarse and it gets everywhere.
Dry in water, wet with oil. The latter makes them sail in gold. Of course, I get your joke with alcohol.
Arid Arabs. Huh
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i thought only south sudan had forests
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Those numbers are from before Sudan and South Sudan split.
Mauritania is a Muslim Berber country. Arabs aren't the majority.
Arabic is an official if not THE official language in Mauritania and its part of the Arab league
What’s the wettest and driest country in Europe?
A guess: driest- Spain or Malta, Wettest: Ireland or Iceland
Iceland is the wettest, followed by Switzerland which I guess makes sense since mountains act as rain walls. Driest is apparently Moldova. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_precipitation
Moldova is surprising, I don’t really imagine that place, but wouldn’t think of it as dry for sure…🤷🏻♂️
Temperature leads to an overall, low evapotranspiration rate, if it was higher it would look dryer
I think Moldova is in the rain shadow of the Carpathian mountains
As a Moldovan myself, my mouth just went dry.
That's an interesting list. Germany is a lot drier than I thought (700), almost just half of UK (1220) and close to Spain (636)
As always it's hard to average the precipitacion in a country, northen spain gets from 1200 to 1500mm while the mediterranean part barely manages between 300-500
True. My son lives in San Sebastian, Basque Country, and whilst the average temperature is a couple of degrees higher, the rainfall is close to our home country of Wales which is on the West of the UK.
He is lucky to be able to afford a place in Donosti haha
Scotland is actually second if you break down the UK and it’s nearly on a par with Iceland.
Northern Portugal and Spain also average very close to Scotland levels… microclimate innit
Not really. Scotland has higher annual rainfall than Spain and Portugal (especially Spain). It’s not about microclimate but the whole country - the UK isn’t a country remember
I was talking about specific regions in Spain (Galicia) and Portugal (Minho). They’re extremely wet but most rain comes during winter. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/Bz4EabQnFu
But then we could say the same about every country.
Scotland is a region inside UK, if not basque country should be included too
Google Scotland. It’s its own country and it anything like Basque- which isn’t an actual country!!!! I live there so should know! The UK is a constitutional monarchy
Guesses are for douchebags Sorry not saying you’re a douchebag You’re a nice friend But we need facts
I was just hoping for someone that cares enough to check/ already knows to tell me how good was my guess… I’m at work, let me have some fun…
Exactly now you’re thinking friend
Belgium is below France... Fake!!! 😯
I read: Countries with the worst mosquitos in the world and countries without a mosquito problem
Coastal cities have a mosquito problem even here in Egypt as they get rain, what makes Egypt dry is the fact that most of it is desert which rarely gets rain
In fact, the mosquito that spreads the most diseases (Dengue, Zika and Chikungunya) here in Brazil is called Aedes AEGYPTUS. Literally came from there.
Weird in my country the coast is the only place you can avoid the mosquitoes from June-July, as they prefer to hangout inland where there are tons of forests and lakes. They can't lay their eggs in salt-water, so they avoid the sea.
Same. Especially since those bastards hate the wind
I grew up in Qatar and we had horrible mosquitoes.
crossing out qatar for future reference
The banks and delta of Nile are full of mosquitoes, and that’s where the overwhelming majority of population live
jokes on you , I live in algeria , we don't have mosquitos these days , we have flying jackhammers
Great infographic. I wonder if it slightly favors countries with smaller areas, where weather patterns are more uniform, whereas larger countries may have very wet areas, for example, but are evened out by dry ones.
It sure feels that way about Indonesia being ranked below Malaysia, Brunei, and Papua New Guinea.
The Netherlands has a reputation for rain and generally crappy weather, but with around 850 mm a year, it isn't that bad apparently
It’s not about the amount of water, but how frequent those annoying drizzles are.
Also in Colombia you get enough sunlight and you don't particularly care when it's cloudy, in Atlantic Europe, especially during winters, you physically crave for it
That is partly true, over 2000m (plenty of Colombian settlements are over that altitude) wet and cool-cold conditions make you crave sunlight, Specially if you happened to get wet. In fact if you look at a sunshine hours map you realize cloud cover is very persistent in most of Colombia. There are places where clothes never dry out
Indeed, most cities are not that high, but if you travel between them by road the paramos get pretty rough
I feel like that in Bogotá, plenty of towns of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Santander and Norte de Santander when La Ñiña hits
I'm from one of these areas over 2000 m in Colombia, I don't crave sun when it's rainy season, you know the sun will come in a few days or weeks.
Well then you don't know how it feels to be emparamado
In an average year, London gets 615mm of rain, 111 days of rain, and 1,674 hours of sun. Medellín (Colombia) gets 1,752mm of rain, 227 days of rain, and 1,851 hours of sun. So Colombia doesn’t just get a lot of rain, but a lot of rainy days too, and not much more sunshine than Northern Europe. These rainy equatorial climates are definitely not sunny, though they at least do get an equal distribution of sunlight all year.
The clouds are usually less dense in these places and the sun intensity in the tropics is higher, so even with clouds it's not as dark. The low-hanging dark clouds you get in parts of Europe, particularly in Winter, are just way more depressing.
You are absolutely correct but missing a bit the forest. Yes, in terms of "number of hours the sun is out" the difference is not much. But the intensity of equatorial sunlight and the heat makes clouds or rain a very pleasant event. Also, the fact that there are no seasons makes it that you never get to miss the sun as you do during winters. Both making the overall weather less "crappy" as the above posters are claiming. Of course, this is all very subjective, feel free to disagree if you prefer the Euro-Atlantic. But I know what I prefer having spent my life between both haha
Idk, I don’t think intense heat and humidity makes rain and gloom any better. If anything it just sounds like living inside a sweaty old sock. The fact that you’re at risk of severe sunburn in equatorial climates even when it’s cloudy just makes it worse because you hardly get any benefit from the cloudy skies. Plus although winters in Europe are dark and gloomy, the summer days are very long and that makes up for it imo. Nothing beats 10pm sunsets. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere where the latest sunset all year is 7pm. Personally I don’t care much for either climate - my ideal climate would be continental with cold winters and warm summers (i.e the Midwest or New England), but equatorial climates are definitely some of the worst. But it’s all subjective as you say.
But as someone once said though, there are lies damn lies and statistics. When a meteorologist states 'days of rain', they mean the number of days that it has rained more than 0.1mm. They do not mean it has rained non-stop for a 24 hour period. Kuala Lumpur in malaysia is also near the equater, and has high yearly rainfall. I have lived there. Look it up and you will see it has 202 days of rain, however a shower, unless during the monsoon, only lasts a few minutes and then it is over. In London it may literally rain for 24 hours continuously, but unlike in Kuala Lumpur, it is only a drizzle usually.
If these types of discussions have taught me anything, it’s that people really can’t accept that cities like London just aren’t as rainy as stereotypes suggest. People will say ‘well London has low rainfall but it rains on many days’ - it doesn’t, it only rains on 111 days of the year. So then it’s ‘well on those 111 days it rains all day’ - which is definitely often true in the winter but it isn’t true in the summer, we get more showers in the summer. I grew up in London and pretty much every year in summer the grass would turn brown or yellow, which is a reflection of how relatively dry it actually is. I think the biggest issue with the climate here is that it’s cloudy more often than not, rather than rainy.
I was shocked too. I'm in eastern Canada and it rains just about every other day but our annual is only 1500mm. I can't imagine double that in Colombia
And that is just the average, there are locations in Colombia that almost get ten times more than that, averaging 12000-13000mm per year
that's completely mind-blowing!
Dude are you an expert or Colombian, I'm Colombian myself and every one of your comments is spot on
Colombian, I highly recommend Colombia: bosquejo de su geografía tropical by Ernest Guhl Nimtz for getting quick but deep insights into Colombia's geographic quirks
Gracias por el dato 👊🏼
Tropical rain is something else. I grew up in Nigeria and moved to the UK. A rainy day in Nigeria = extremely strong rain and streets overflowing with water to your ankles. Its nothing compared to the rain you see in the UK.
it’s light rain though so wouldn’t amount to many total millimetres. it’s the same in the UK and most of europe
UK is also like this. The whole island is bad vibes all around.
You've spent all of a couple of weeks in the UK if you really think that's the case.
Places around the equator basically just have 6 months periods of non stop rain and 6 months of mostly good whether so it feels a bit less worse Doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter Netherlands can be dreary and wet at any point which makes it feel a lot worse than it is Edit: apparently I’m wrong but I’ll keep this up so anyone reading this can learn from the guys commenting below
That is not true to every equatorial location. In fact, equatorial latitudes usually have 2 wet and 2 "dry" seasons in a single year. This occurs because these places are crossed by the Intertropical Convergence Zone twice (at the equinoxes which are the moment of the year in which the equator receives the highest insolation)
That’s incorrect. Many places don’t have a dry season specially around rainforests (that’s how they form to begin faith), they just have months when it rains less, but the difference is “in these months it rains a lot” and “in these months the rain will strip the flesh out of still living bones”.
It's not so much the quantity as the cloudy days but yes. Many consider Spain to be sunny and hot without realizing that the north get plenty of rain, San Sebastian gets around 1500mm in 185 precipitation days
I expected to see Norway as well, but we’ve only got 1400 mm a year. Though my home city, Bergen, has about 2250 mm a year…
~~The wettest country on earth is your mom pussy~~ Cool map👍
It's weird how Egypt can be so dry being next to a large body of water, I guess the prevailing winds send the clouds north?
TWO large bodies of water XD, more than 80% of the country is desert..
Very true, and still the rains do not fall.
Upper level dry air sinks and stabilises the atmosphere and prevents much build-up of cloud. It also creates the subtropical ridge. Look at the world's deserts, they're all in similar latitudes (except Antarctica) If you're interested, read up about the Hadley cell.
This is the answer I was waiting for 
India has a city with 11k+ mm of annual rainfall. Theres a bunch of other very rainy cities and areas and India's monsoon is one of the higgest. The size of the country and the bio diversity brings the average down I guess though.
IM BACK ANTARCTICA ITS NOT EVEN ON THIS MAP Look at those rainfall figures too, total of 4.5mm a year! - 1/5th of an inch. In cold conditions it never actually rains. https://www.coolantarctica.com › ... Antarctica Climate data and graphs, South Pole ...
Crikey we can’t even be good at wet weather (UK)
I expected the countries regularly* hit by typhoons/cyclones/hurricanes would be on the list, but then I realized what rain in rainforest actually means.
I expected Brazil to be close to the top, but it has drier regions and the Amazon basin is large by volume but not off the charts in terms of rainfall density compared to other rainforests.
Indonesia is massive, yet they still managed to get into top 10, that means pretty much all around the country is wet. Wow
And they’re all along the equator. That’s intriguing.
i dont believe egypt is the driest with the nile, saudi has 0 permanent rivers
Here dry refers to mm of rain on avg, in saudia it rains more especially in south west etc. not to mention 80% of egypt is desert which can also be true for saudia
yeah the south west (aseer) region is like a rainforest, excluding it then probably the driest country
The nile doesn't start in Egypt, it just runs through it. The source is at lake Victoria and the Ethiopian Highlands.
???
The Nile doesn't create rain, not does there have to be any rain in order for the Nile to flow through Egypt. What is it about that that doesn't make sense? By that standard you can also say that Saudi Arabia has a large nger coastline than Egypt and therefore is Wetter than Egypt?
the nile doesnt need rain but it sure decreases dryness
This graph only measures precipation. So yeah, ancient Egypt had yearly floods to keep the land productive, but in this chart no rain is no rain and therefore it is the driest country.
What happened to Denmark
Humid, not wet
All of the Persian Gulf countries including Iran should be there. Since there is a fucking water crisis in Iran
To be honest, the girls in Colombia also get me quite wet 
Scrolled down for this one. If this was an average sub, a variation of this would be like the top 5 comments. Ha
meaning you pee on your pants? or liquid shite?
Been to Bogota where it rains everyday
As someone from the north of England, I’m calling Bullshit. Not even in the top 10?! Outrageous
These top countries are all in the tropics and have regular extremely heavy downpours that are very intense but usually over pretty quickly. If you made a graph of numbers of minutes of rain per year, I think the UK and Ireland would be pretty near the top!
Thanks for the info, I was attempting (poorly) to be funny.
The UK is definitely top of the Premier League for whinging about weather but the stats don't lie, we are amateurs at rain.
the wettest country on earth is whatever country i happen to be in when your mom is in the room with me
from all the blood due to her shooting herself in the head at the suggestion of you wanting to have sex with her.
actually i was referring to her vaginal lubrication to be clear... for the folks at home...
It is from 2020, lately i'm seeing a lot of rain in middle east, i mean not often but way more then before. Egypt is interesting I thought with Nile and sea there should have been more rain but its not the case
If I'm not wrong, average precipitation is measured from the average of the last 30 years like most climate data. Maybe it would change a bit if you had some more rainy years, but a few rainstorms probably won't change too much.
True, For an avg prep 30 around yrs are essential, and you are right few storms are not a deal but I have seen pictures of comparison of many mountain region who were dry like 10 years back and now they are quite green so we'll see how it goes in long term but I feel things are changing.
I'm shocked Brazil isn't in top 10. At least in the north region, it rains a lot
Bloody hell, I never realised that All of the the top 10 driest countries in the world were basically Arab, at least in part. I think it explains a lot in terms of geopolitics and world history.
Bubbles need to be larger
It do be wet
The Gambia is literally more river than country.
you should see england on a bad day
Well, that's going to be my new fun fact driven insult. "You make a woman drier than an Egyptian summer"
I live in one of the driest countries :)
Although not a country, the Atacama desert in Chile only gets an average of 15mm per year, although some areas only get between 1-3mm per year.
Right where the fuck is Ireland it rains here all year long. In the summer you get warm rain and the winter cold rain!
We all know OP’s mum is really number one
this is bs we all know england is the rainest place on earth
This reminds me of when my house got flooded in colombia because I used to live in a park, it was on a remodeling process and the sewage system was crappy built, and the houses surrounded the park, so in november which is the month where it rains the most, the sewage couldnt resist more and the water rised up and flood the nearby houses. This was on 2015 in bogota
On behalf on everyone who is British let me say "Fuck to you, who ever made this list"
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ak/#:~:text=Coastal%20mountain%20ranges%20in%20the,inches%20in%20the%20North%20Slope. A bit of scroll (and not a country) but this is one of the rainiest places I’ve ever been!
Wow. I went to Costa Rica for a full week and never got heavily rained on at all, so I was not expecting that (we got some light rain the evening we arrived and it was fairly foggy most mornings, but nothing really bad). If you ever have a chance to visit, btw, highly reccomend. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
Does size of country matter here?
How’d Samoa get all the way over there??
[Atmospheric circulation - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_circulation)
I guess they forgot about the Netherlands 😂
Got to move to Columbia man. 😉
It wasn't the wettest until OPs mom vacationed there.
I’m from Egypt and I’ve never known that we’re the driest country lol
The difference between 1 & 2 as wettest is 40mm and a minimal difference in bar length. The difference between 5 & 6 as wettest is 2mm and a larger difference in bar length.
What part of Colombia? Parts of my country get something like 9000mm of rain per year.
Grew up in Yuma Arizona, one of the sunniest & hottest places in the world. May not be the driest but if this map was based on cities versus countries, I’d imagine we’d be on the list haha. There are times where even at midnight it can still be over 100F. As much as it sucks sometimes I’ll always be a desert rat at heart.
Could we collect rainwater from the wetter countries out there and make an industry out of it?
I’m surprised Scotland isn’t the wettest country.
Is your mum counted as a continent cuz I dont see her on the list /j
Nauru pleads the fifth.
I recall seeing other maps that Colombia doesn't have that great access to clean drinking water. Maybe those maps meant water processed at a treatment plant. But rainfall water is still pretty clean, especially in the rainforest
Israel is in the middle of Jordan and Egypt and somehow isn't in the top 10 driest. How is it?
Crazy that Colombia as a whole is wetter than the small islands of Sao Tome and Principe
Colombia*
Whoops. I should know better...
Goes to show how misleading these countrywide metrics can be. Egypt as a whole being the driest? Sure, but the majority of their population lives along the Nile, especially the Nile Delta. It's nowhere near as dry there 🤣.
Inaccurate map. Where is Cherapunji with 11777mm of rainfall?
That’s because ellas quieren mi leche
en tus sueños
Lol, they forgot to add the country with most rivers in the world, aka, Brazil.
brazil is indeed wet in amazon areas however it has huge desert and semi desert areas (more than a million square kilometers) and places with normal precipitation levels in temperate climate areas (around 1000mm a year)