Okay, it's raining again today and I just had to know: what is the deal, really, about the weather in Calgary? Is it a sunny place to live, or not? Is it a drier climate? Months ago I'd read something in Wikipedia to the effect that Toronto got four times the precipitation as Calgary, but over the past few weeks it was starting to seem hard to believe.

So this morning I looked it up on the Environment Canada website. And it showed that, basically, you can't always trust Wikipedia. What I learned is that while precipitation here is considerably less than Toronto, instead of being slightly more than a quarter of the total (as Wikipedia has it) it's slightly more than half.

Here are the facts, as recorded at the two city's major airports:

Annual average precipitation
Toronto: 792.7 millimeters (31.2 inches)
Calgary: 412.6 millimeters (16.2 inches)

Average days in a year with precipitation
Toronto: 145.5
Calgary: 113.6

Calgary does get a fair amount of rain from May to September, the website shows, but Toronto gets significantly more during those months--with the exception of June, when Calgary gets slightly more. (People here tell me that that's when we get exciting thunderstorms, hail and the like.)

Bottom line: this rain, rain, rain, day in and day out, that we've been experiencing is unusual and not the norm for this time of year in Calgary.