This is your periodic reminder that daily rain/snow "records" (e.g. "most __ on this date on record") are all but meaningless at best and potentially misleading.

1/

Unlike temperature data where you have a "hit" for every day matching said date in your period of record, you have far, far fewer "hits" for a single date. This makes any single outlier that much less important.

2/

Because there's so little precip data for a given date, when one highlights a daily precip record, you're almost always highlighting noise rather than actual signal.

Look at daily snow records for Raleigh: https://www.weather.gov/media/rah/climate/RDU%20Daily%20Snowfall%20Records.pdf

There's no curve. It's just noise.

3/

It would be far more meaningful to say (if true) "this is the most __ we've had on any single day/24-hour period in December" or similar. Instead of one date's worth of "hits", you're now looking at a much broader set of data from which comparisons are useful.

4/

TL;DR: Daily precip "records' are meaningless noise unless you have an insanely long period of record - such that your daily precip records exhibit some homogeneity, similar to temperature records.

Better (if true): Most __ for a day/24-hour period in a month or season.

5/5