Edmonton's Temperature Landscape

Nothing too complicated today - we're just going to take a look at this animation, which I've been using snippets of for the past few months:

What this shows is the High temperatures for all of the days each month, for 1996-2016.
(it actually only goes to the 29th of each month, because otherwise it wouldn't animate as nicely).

In these landscapes, the "warmer" the colour is, the warmer the corresponding temperature. There is a lot going on, but I think it gives a sense of how the overall temperatures shift as we move throughout the year.

If you want to take a closer look at any of the months individually, the images are all here.

To make a bit more sense of this it's easiest to compare the extremes:

January & July

In Edmonton our temperatures warm up until mid-July (roughly July 22) and then they start trending downward and bottom out somewhere in early-to-mid-January. So here we're flipping back and forth between the two.

Not surprisingly, the July temperatures are much warmer. The average High in January is about -6°C, compared to 24°C for July. So for July the whole landscape is shifted up by an average of about 30°C, and the colours are much warmer.

The July landscape is also much more level and consistent than January's. In January there are deep valleys in blue for our coldsnaps, and beige-y peaks for the chinooks. The July landscape is comparatively quite flat, which goes back to something that we saw a few weeks ago when we talked about averages - our range of temperatures is much smaller in the summer than it is in the winter.

Temperature Range

We can see those differences here, with the range of possible temperatures in January being about twice as large as the range in July. And when we'd looked at averages in detail we saw something similar: during the summer our temperatures will be within ±8°C of the average about 95% of the time, but for winter that 95% range is ±18°C.

June

Right now we're in the middle of June, where the landscape is pretty similar to July, and is pretty flat. 2017 isn't shown here, but so far this month our average high has been 22°C, swinging from a warm 27.9°C on the 7th to a cold 15.7°C on the 11th.

And that's about it for today.

Just to end things off, here's the same animation again, but this time at super-speed: