On a national scale, Switzerland's average annual precipitation is approximately . However, this figure is misleading because of the country's extreme geographic variety. Generally, Swiss rainfall follows these broad trends:
Emil thought of the morning his wife died. He had still gone outside at seven, emptied the copper cylinder, recorded 12.7 millimeters. He thought of the summer he lost his barn to a mudslide—the rain gauge had read 89 millimeters in twenty-four hours. The ground had simply given up. average rainfall in switzerland