The winter of 2015-2016 marked my 10th year of either walking or cycling to work everyday. From 2006 through 2009 I had a 3.5km/30 minute walk each way, and from 2009 onwards it's been a 7km/20 minute ride.
And after 10 years, I started thinking about the weather. And more specifically, about what is a "typical" Edmonton winter day? I feel like the last 5 winters have all been really mild, but is that true? And were things really so much worse when I was a kid? Is my memory of this stuff accurate at all?
Thankfully, Environment Canada has allowed me to answer my questions by making historical weather data easily available on their website. I tend to use data from the Edmonton Blatchford weather station, and I talked a little bit about that here: Data Sources.
This is not going to be rigorously scientific or statistical. My main goal is to try to make sense of my experiences as a year-round "active" commuter in Edmonton.
This is also not about Climate Change. There are climate scientists who know much more about that than I could ever hope to. I'm definitely not an expert. I'm just playing around with 130-odd years of weather records, and making some charts in excel.
On twitter I am @yegwxnerdery
Hi!
ReplyDeleteNice to see a fellow temperature nerd. I have done a ton of analysis of temperature (mostly for developing turtle eggs which act a lot like crops and trees), and in comparison it appears that a lot of the analysis here is based on high and low temperatures. A lot of growth for plants are done using a concept called "heat units" which are basically the area under the temperature curve above a certain threshold temperature for growth. This might be the reason why in your "growing season" length is similar in length throughout the year to a century ago.... but maybe that was just to crazy a concept to explain to people so you know that already!
Nice to see some beautiful and interesting temperature graphs.
Love your graphs...what software do you use?
ReplyDeleteThanks, there is some really good reference material in here! I have asked myself some of these same questions - good to see some of the history and trends available and presented in an understandable way.
ReplyDeleteSome great data here! I've recently come across a cool weather station - https://www.YEGWeather.com
ReplyDeleteHave you ever considered documenting the date that the leaves come out every year? I am curious about that but I can’t seem to find any good data anywhere.
ReplyDeleteNice blog! This is useful for those who is looking for the historical weather data. Keep Sharing such information blog.
ReplyDeleteLove all of the information you have here. The visualizations are incredibly informative. Any chance of adding some of our northern cities to the cities list? Yellowknife and Iqaluit perhaps? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI do have a separate dashboard for northern locations here:
Deletehttps://public.tableau.com/app/profile/yegwxnerdery/viz/NorthernStationsWarmColdYearsMonths/AllCityBars
The problem is getting long histories without too many gaps. And in the north the two best ones are Dawson City and Hay River.
I've also just "promoted" Dawson City and a few other cities (Victoria, Kelowna, etc) to the main dashboards, so it will be part of the write-ups from now on.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/yegwxnerdery/viz/EdmontonWarmColdMonths/AllCityDecadePies