For years now, I’ve been passing along my grandpa’s weather-related reportage to you, the readers.
From the snow and floods of early 1962 to the torrid final week of August 1973, and even to storms that never showed up, I’ve shared my grandfather’s detailed records of temperature and precipitation to bring back long-ago events. He was clearly fascinated by the weather, and he took copious notes about it.
This week I’m here to say that … well, you know all those numbers?
They might not have been 100 percent accurate.
May 29, 1968. The Mets and Yankees are both six games out of first. Neither will play today, for reasons explained directly above.
Four-and-a-half inches of rain is a metric arseload of rain for one day.
That’s wet-basement potential, flash-flood potential, turn-around-don’t-drown potential. (Especially if the preceding days have also been wet, though it doesn’t look like they were in this case.)
It looks like late May and early June of 1968 were pretty crappy, weather-wise, all over the U.S. According to FEMA, flooding and tornado disasters were declared on May 29 in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Iowa, with additional declarations a week later in Illinois and Ohio.
Just last year, the New York Times declared May 29, 1968, still the all-time rainiest May day ever recorded in the five boroughs …
… with a rain total of 3.99 inches.
It’s possible that Stamford, up the coast from New York, somehow got a half-inch more rain than the big city did. (I haven’t been able to find a trustworthy online source for Stamford-specific weather information.)
But they’re not that far apart geographically, and the Times is a pretty authoritative source. Which makes me wonder how and where my grandpa got the weather info he put on his calendars every day.
I’m pretty confident he didn’t just make it up.
And I’m also pretty sure he didn’t have a weather station in his backyard to personally track the temperature and rainfall. Even if he did, he was still working in 1968, and not home all the time so he could keep an eye on it.
If I had to guess, I’d say his weather reports were taken from either the Stamford Advocate or WSTC, the local radio station. The Tri-State area is large enough that the New York papers and stations might not be counted on to give Stamford-specific info.
Wherever he got it from, I’m now suspecting that it might have been an inch off here, a couple of degrees off there — sometimes on the high side, sometimes on the low.
It doesn’t really matter in the long run. Everything I write about is locked safely away in the past. And no one’s looking to my grandpa’s calendar entries as any kind of accurate historical record.
But I always assumed they were accurate to one-tenth of an inch, so I’m a little put off.
Ah, well. It is an important step in all of our personal development to learn that our elders are flawed, and don’t always have the right answers.
Some of us just take longer to learn than others.
Hope Street 
“Counting the Rain” is a good title. As I read your blog, I expected you were going to conclude that factually the rainfall in Stamford that day was 1.5″ or some such (which is still a lot of rain). I think 3.99 is damn close!
Your grandfather might have had a rain measuring device at one point; he was THAT interested in weather. But I’m sure it didn’t measure to the hundredth of an inch. So I am quite sure he got the 4.53″, which he was both confident of and amazed by – judging by the surety of his dark printing – from some official source. As you stated, perhaps the Stamford Advocate, or perhaps the local WSTC news, which often had direct weather reports from the Stamford Museum.
The rain totals given on weather reports I watch on local TV in Rochester, New York, vary a lot mile by mile. It’s not unusual for one spot to report .4″ and another 4 miles away to report .7″. (They don’t seem to bother with hundredths anymore.) And Stamford is around 35 miles from New York as I recall, so that a half an inch difference would seem feasible based on what I see reported on TV today.
After the recent storm which devastated Penn Yan, NY, numbers were reported on TV and in print between 2.5″ and 5″ for essentially the same town during the same period. I don’t know whether the amount of rain is actually fairly constant and is just difficult to measure accurately, or whether the amount of rain really varies that much from place to nearby place. But I do know that 46 years after your grandfather’s calendar, with whatever technology advances we may enjoy (it’s the Digital Age! Get with it!), major differences in actual rainfall totals for the same area are reported in the press.
I agree, your elders aren’t perfect, but I’m going with your grandfather on this one. I think he got his 4.53″ from the press or radio, and I’m betting he got it right! As far as the accuracy of press… you’re the expert on that!
Yeah, I trust the man.
Every day WSTC had weather reports from the Stamford Museum and Nature center, They were an official weather recording station. You could see the equipment (pretty basic) when you visited. We listened every morning on the way to school to a live report and I’m pretty sure it was your Grandfather’s source.
High variations in rain totals in relatively small areas is pretty common, especially in the spring. I go with Grandpa!
My faith in my elders has been restored. 😉