Well, it rains a lot here, but the notions that people have of Seattle are exaggerated. It certainly isn't the case that it rains more often than it doesn't, even in the dead of winter. Even when it does rain, most of the time it's a drizzle, and thus not much more than an annoyance rather than a true inconvenience. Some people get tired of the drizzle and say that they would prefer 3 days of downpour to 10 days of light rain. I'm very used to it, so it doesn't phase me. A bigger problem, I would say, is that it is overcast and gray here 19 days out of 20 during the winter, which can get to people who move here from the southwest or other sunnier places. On the plus side, cold weather periods here are usually in the vicinity of 35 degrees, and the rare "extreme" colds are almost never more than a few degrees below freezing during the day. I'm not sure what the night-time annual lows are, but I doubt that they are below 20, and rarely that low. It's certainly colder than San Diego, but people from the midwest laugh in our faces when we claim that it's cold out. Our summers are beautiful, not unpleasantly hot for more than a handful of days (and even then only in the nineties), and not humid. PM me if you have any specific questions about Seattle. I love it here, and am desperately hoping to stay here for med school this fall. (Ah, and to align my post a bit with the theme of this thread, I'm pretty sure that I will get an MD/MPH while in school, if not here then at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I've already been accepted. Can anyone tell me about the weather there?)
