GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — You know the saying, and many of you love to say it.
"If you don't like the weather in West Michigan, wait 5 minutes and it will change!"
The question is though, is this statement fact or fiction? How often does our weather change significantly in 5 minutes? What even counts as a significant change?
Well, unlike most people who never give this saying a second thought, Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service Alaska Region, wanted to quantify the phrase and put it to the test. He tweeted his results last week and it became pretty obvious from his data that some areas are doing a lot better at telling the truth with this saying than others.
The metric Brian chose for his calculations was a 5 degree or more temperature swing in a period of 5 minutes. He picked this value as it is unlikely to be caused by routine daily events, such as the sun rising or setting.
While we didn't ask him about other weather phenomena that he could have picked, it makes sense to ignore things like snow or rain, sunshine or cloudiness, as with every single time it starts to rain or the sun comes out, there was a period of 5 minutes leading up to it where the weather was presumably doing something else.
The regions with the highest frequency of a 5 minute temperature swings are out west and around the Rocky Mountains. The two largest factors here are the dry air, which can more easily change temperature, and the effects of air coming out of the mountains.
The further east you get the more stable the temperatures become, due in part to moisture and more gradual changes in conditions brought about by our typical weather patterns.
So how does the saying hold up in West Michigan?
Not well.
When it came to the numbers in our region, we are rather unlikely to see a shift of 5 degrees or more in a 5 minute period. In fact, Grand Rapids and Holland both average under 50 of these events per year, or about 1 event roughly every 8 days.
That may seem frequent, but compared to places out west that see over 700 events per year, about 2 events per day, this number is very small. In fact, Sheridan County Airport in Wyoming sees 1095.3 events per year on average, right at 3 of these shifts every single day!
On the other side of the coin, the area least likely to have their temperature change by 5 degrees in 5 minutes is Seattle, Washington, with only 10.5 events per year. This works out to 1 event roughly every 34 to 35 days.
You can see some of our local rankings below. Number 1 would be most likely to change, with the list going down to Seattle at number 820.
So, at the end of the day, this saying may not carry the weight we feel it does in West Michigan, but that doesn't mean we don't feel like our weather is always shifting. Brian actually suggested to us that areas that see fewer days of fast shifting weather may actually feel this saying to be more true than areas that see these shifts frequently.
The reason for this being that if the weather goes through these big shifts every single day, then it doesn't feel like something special or unusual, and it will likely be forgotten. However, when it is more rare, each event sticks out in our minds and can help to form a stronger thought or feeling on the matter.
In the end, whether you like the weather or are waiting on that change just 5 minutes away, the 13 On Your Side Weather Team will be here to keep you up to date on the very latest!
-- Meteorologist Michael Behrens
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