Mean

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#15 - Mean

The last day of school before winter break had finally finished and I was ready to go home. I patiently waited in front of the school for my ride to come to pick me up, but then a sudden downpour erupted, drenching me. I quickly rushed out of the rain under the roof of a building. A few moments later, my ride arrived. The downpour continued as I pondered how much rain we’ve had recently. Is it always rainy in Washington? My whole life I often heard that Washington is always rainy, even famously so with Forks, Washington. With this investigation, I will investigate how the amounts of rainy days Washington experiences, based on data from different years.

To explore this, I utilized the data collected by the National Weather Service¹. I chose to apply mean to get an average number of rainy days per year in Washington using data from different years. In this case, I will be using 2019, 2020, and 2021 data as they are the most recent datasets to pick from. The mean formula² is shown below.

In this formula, n represents the number of years we are exploring, which is 3 since we are investigating 3 different years. The monthly and annual precipitations for each year in Seattle is shown in the tables below.

With this data, we can see that in 2019, there were 152 rainy days, in 2020, there were 184 rainy days, and in 2021, there were 176 rainy days. We can now plug this into our mean formula to calculate an average of how many days of rainfall Washington gets per year.

With our investigation, we can conclude that Washington receives an average of 170.67 days of rainfall per year. We can also conclude that Washington has rainy days for almost half the days out the entire year. With this data, we can explore different plant and wildlife options for Washington, using the average days of rainfall to determine whether these organisms would survive and flourish in the Washington climate. A few limitations with this exploration would be only using one source to gather data and only exploring 3 different years. This is important because the average can be skewed if one or a few of those years had abnormal reports. However, due to climate change, using the most recent data allows us to use the average as a reference for the future with our world changing by the second.

References

¹Climate. (n.d.). National Weather Service. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://www.weather.gov/wrh/climate?wfo=sew

²Population Mean And Sample Mean (video lessons, examples, solutions). (n.d.). Www.Onlinemathlearning.Com. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://www.onlinemathlearning.com/population-mean.html