Rainfall across the Tennessee Valley was 20% above normal last year, with more than 60 inches of rain falling across the region for the fourth consecutive year.
Mother Nature dumped nearly 63 inches of rain in Chattanooga during 2021, or nearly 8 inches more than in a normal year. The National Weather Service is forecasting another wetter-than-normal start to the new year in Chattanooga, even with the frigid temperatures expected in the next few days.
“We’ve seen higher rainfall totals in each of the past four years, which reflects the impact of [the climate pattern] El Niño warming the surface waters in the Pacific and bringing more rain in our region,” Allan Diegan, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Morristown, said in a telephone interview. “Our forecasts for the next three months show a continued pattern of above-average rainfall.”
But the soggy weather during much of last year was still less than in 2020, when nearly 73 inches of rain fell in Chattanooga. Across the Tennessee Valley, total rainfall averaged nearly 61 inches last year, or nearly 10 inches more than normal.
Rainfall in 2021 in the region still was well below the record high set in 2020, when the Tennessee Valley received 70.3 inches of rain, according to TVA. Chattanooga’s soggiest year was 1994, when a record 73.7 inches of rain was recorded by the National Weather Service at the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport.