September was a record-setting month for rainfall in Hansville in North Kitsap, but not for the rest of the Kitsap Peninsula, which overall still received lots of rain. This demonstrates again how different one part of our region is from another — and how Kitsap County is a world apart from the rest of the Puget Sound region.
As we close out Water Year 2019, we can see from the charts that that the annual rainfall (blue line) was below average (pink line), but September rains nearly pushed Hansville up to the average mark.
Hansville had a total of 3.56 inches of rainfall in September, according to data maintained by the Kitsap Public Utility District. That’s more rain than any other September going back to 1990, when the KPUD records begin. The second-highest September rainfall was in 2013, with 2.88 inches.
In Silverdale, the monthly total was 2.71 inches of precipitation. Typically, Silverdale gets more rain than Hansville. In fact, the median average for Silverdale in September is 25 percent higher — 1.0 inch, compared to Hansville’s 0.8 inch.
But if you’re talking about records for Silverdale, you need to go back to 2013, when 6.8 inches of rain fell in September. That’s far more than any other year going back to 1991. In 1997, 5.4 inches fell on Silverdale in September, but no other year had even 3 inches.
In fact, the month of September 2013 was reported as “one for the record books” in a Kitsap Sun story at the time. Reporter Brynn Grimley said rainfall Sept. 28-29, 2013, was 2.2 inches in one day — the most since 1899. The storm also brought winds that knocked down trees and power lines, Brynn reported.
The year 2013 set rainfall records throughout most of Kitsap County.
Holly, which typically gets some of the heaviest rainfalls on the peninsula, received 5.4 inches this past September. That is a lot, considering that September is typically fairly dry, but it is nowhere near the record of 9.6 inches set for Holly in 2013. The median average there is 1.5 inches in September.
We have to recognize that we are limited to a 30-year period when talking about records in the KPUD database, but it’s still worth discussing. Bellingham, where the records go back to 1949, set a new rainfall high last month with 4.73 inches of precipitation, just above the old record of 4.71 inches for September 1969, according to the National Weather Service’s Twitter feed.
So September was indeed a wet month on the Kitsap Peninsula and other places in the Puget Sound region. For Water Year 2019 as a whole, however, we did not reach the annual average. Hansville received a total of 29.4 inches, compared to a median average of 30.7 inches. Silverdale received 37.2 inches, compared to a median average of 42.8. And Holly received 68.5 inches, compared to a median average of 79.2.
While Western Washington and much of the Northwest experienced at least twice the normal rainfall in September, much of the country was fairly dry. By next week, most of the eastern portion of the country will get some rain, predicts Brad Rippey, meteorologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Heavy rain may occur across the upper Midwest, where some rivers are already running high, he said.
Cooler-than-normal conditions with above-normal precipitation are expected to continue from the Northwest into Montana during the Oct. 8-12 time period, while large sections of the Plains, Southwest, Midwest and mid-South undergo drier-then-normal conditions, according to the forecast (PDF 5.7 mb) in the “USDA Water and Climate Update.”
