Canada's Rainiest Cities

Wettest Weather

Among Canada's 25 largest cities, seven average over one metre (39 inches) of precipitation a year. Abbotsford tops the list with 1573 millimetres, about five feet, of rain and snow annually.

The amount of precipitation a metropolitan area receives can vary considerably from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Topography particularly affects rainfall in the Vancouver region, which sprawls across a flat river delta to the foot of a coastal mountain range.

The precipitation data given here for Vancouver are measured at the airport, located on an island in the Fraser River. But not far from there, at the base of Grouse Mountain on Redonda Drive in North Vancouver, rain gauges fill much higher. The North Vancouver weather station averages 2477 mm, over eight feet, of precipitation a year. North Vancouver gets twice the precipitation of the Vancouver airport, and considerably more even than Abbotsford.

Major cities included in the weather rankings are the 25 Canadian metropolitan areas with the largest populations, according to Statistics Canada's 2006 census.

Major cities in Canada averaging over one metre (39 inches) of total precipitation, falling as rain or snow, a year.

City	mm Precipitation
Abbotsford	1573
St. John's	1514
Halifax	1452
Quebec City	1230
Vancouver	1199
Sherbrooke	1144
Trois-Rivieres	1100

Most Rain in a Day

Rainstorms dumping over 100 millimetres (3.9 inches) of rain in a single day have hit eight of Canada's major cities. These are their largest one-day rainfalls on record:

City	mm Rain	Date
Halifax	218	August 15, 1971
Regina	160	June 15, 1887
Oshawa	145	June 27, 1971
Kingston	129	Sep 14, 1979
Toronto	121	Oct 15, 1954
St. John's	121	July 27, 1946
Edmonton	114	July 31, 1953
Hamilton	107	July 26, 1989

Most Rainy Days

Six out of Canada's 25 largest urban centres have on average over 125 rainy days in a year:

City	Days a Year With Rain
Abbotsford	171
St. John's	162
Vancouver	161
Victoria	150
Halifax	132
Sherbrooke	128