It never rains in Jerusalem

If you are during the summer in Jerusalem you usually don't see any rain for month. Sometimes you wish there will be a refreshing shower, but chances are high, there won't be a drop of rain. So it can feel like it never rains in Jerusalem. But then when winter comes there are these rainy days with massive amounts of precipitation. But these weeks with rainfall are just a few. In comparison to Berlin the feeling is that there is not a lot of rainfall in Jerusalem.

Weekly rainfall in Jerusalem and Berlin

previous year next year

After comparing the temperature and haven't been surprised there I was amazed how much it really rains in Jerusalem. The weekly average is roughly the same, some years even more than in Berlin! But the distribution is totally different. In Berlin it rains around the year, mostly every week. There a small spikes in the summer. In Jerusalem you usually won't see rain half a year from April to September, but the amount of rain during some weeks of winter are multiples of what you ever see in Berlin.

Data

The datasource for this visualization is the historical weather data from NOAA National Climatic Data Center, the same as for the temperature comparison.

For this visualization I added up weekly values to smoothen out daily variations. The data is brought to JSON format via small scripts you can download at github. The data is available for Jerusalem(json) and Berlin(json).