Bill Messmer stands proudly underneath the weather station on his back porch on March 4. For the past seven or eight years, Messmer used the station to collect daily precipitation data. Before that, he used a plastic measuring tube dating back to 1984. He is retiring from collecting data this year.
What motivates a man to wake up and start his day with the same habit for 40 years? Bill Messmer doesn't know.
Messmer started collecting rainfall data from his house in town in 1984. Four decades later, he is calling it quits. The reason?
Well - there isn't really one.
He just shrugged and said, "It's been 40 years."
Messmer's first month of collecting data was January 1984. If you're curious, precipitation - rain and melted snow - totaled 16.04 inches that month. Every morning he woke up, checked his gauge and wrote down the previous day's figure. Initially, he would scribble the measurement on a monthly calendar, but when his U.S. Forest Service job forced him to learn Microsoft Excel, he pivoted to the electronic spreadsheet.
That was just one of two changes Messmer made to his system since 1984 The other? About seven or eight years ago he upgraded his back porch's measurement system from a single plastic tube to a complete weather station that measures wind speed and direction, rainfall, humidity and temperature. Other than that, no changes, and Messmer never missed a measurement.
He initially started recording data to compare it with a friend of his who lived out the road. Messmer said his friend at 6-Mile usually always had higher measurements than himself. For context, Messmer lives on Crest Drive, near the base of Mount Dewey. If it was ever your responsibility to housesit for him, one of your duties was to record the rainfall data.
There have been seven different U.S. presidents since he recorded his first drop of rain. In that same timeframe, Martin Scorsese made 18 movies, Oprah Winfrey endorsed 107 books and Elvis Presley released precisely zero songs.
As for the data itself, Messmer said it certainly varied, ebbed and flowed, but he hasn't noticed any general trends that spanned all four decades of data collection.
The most precipitation in a single year he recorded was 134.17 inches in 1987. Opposite that, the driest year on record was in 2018, when it totaled just 56.38 inches. While there was a brief less-wet slump in 2018 and 2019, the clouds opened back up in 2020. In the past five years, Messmer recorded an average of 93.81 inches, a number on par with the 40-year average of 92.67 inches.
If you're wondering what happens when it snows, Messmer also has an answer for that: He simply melts the snow and measures it in a liquid state.
Over a 40-year average, October was consistently the rainiest month of the year, with June consistently the driest. This trend continued in 2024 when October took home yet another wettest-month award with 9.92 inches of rain.
In November 2023, the month a deadly landslide swept down the midsection of Wrangell Island, Messmer recorded 18.63 inches of rainfall, nearly the same amount of rain as the previous two Novembers combined.
He said authorities have never approached him for his data, though he does often cross-reference it with the weather station at the airport.
As for what's next, Messmer appears to be a one-of-one; there does not appear to be a rainfall guru in town as committed to the daily measurements like he has been.
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