The Rollercoaster

Here are some fancy charts of Edmonton's yearly temperature rollercoaster:

These use data from the last 20 years rather than going all the way back to the 1880's, so they're roughly representative of what we except to see today. The white line is the average, the grey band is the 50%-of-the-time range, and the oranges and blues are the warm and cold extremes.

The low point on the rollercoaster is in mid-January - things bottom out around New Year's but then it takes another week or two for the upswing to start. And right now we are - somewhat distressingly - only about two months away from the high point in mid-July.

And here is the actual 2016 data. As we've seen before, it's been well above the average for pretty much the whole year, with the exception of a few weeks in January.

But the rollercoaster that's on my mind right now is the day-to-day one that we've been on recently:

This is the same data from the other charts, but it is zoomed-in to focus on the last month-and-a-half. And we really have seen some wild temperatures swings, with the highs rising and falling and rising and falling by 20°C over the span of a few days.

This year has had some very warm (although again, not unprecedented) days, but every spring pulls this trick. We get a few days of fake-summer - so we put away the sweaters, turn off the furnace, and grab the sunscreen - and then things return to normal (or below normal).





















Not that I'm complaining. But with the weather we've had it's just strange to think that we can't count on days being consistently above 20°C until the start of July.