Dr. David M. Schultz

National Severe Storms Laboratory

CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Weekend Precipitation

On a lark, I decided to test the folklore that it rained more often on weekends than weekdays. My results were actually quite surprising. I found coherent spatial patterns across the United States where it rained more often during the weekdays than weekends, and vice versa. This research has been published in the 1998 Annual Swimsuit Issue (March/April 1998) Annals of Improbable Research.

A reprint can be found here. or here.


Map of locations with weekend precipitation events occurring more frequently than expected (2/7) are unshaded.

From the archives of New Scientist, 29 August, 1998:

FEEDBACK

As a peer review journal, Nature is usually the first to report the research that appears in its pages. Just occasionally, however, the magazine gets scooped.

Thus a "news" item in the journal at the beginning of August reported that it rains more often on weekends than on weekdays. But this wasn't news to Feedback, who enjoys dipping into the humour magazine The Annals of Improbable Research.

In the March/April issue of that journal, David Schultz of the National Severe Storms Research Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, reported the same phenomenon. Will Nature reprimand its referees for failing to notice prior publication?

If you have any further questions about the research discussed here, or desire a manuscript, please feel free to write to me: david.schultz@noaa.gov.

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