User:Soap/climate

Roswell

The warming of Roswell, NM seems to be due mostly to a change in the station location rather than global warming or a UHI. see here, where we are getting our data from ROSWELL IND AIR PK and the older station (still running) was ROSWELL CLIMAT, which might actually be the better of the two in terms of accuracy, but also less representative of the area since it's almost as cold as Albuquerque.

these temperatures from 2004-2012 show that Roswell has warmed very little since 1951-1980. theyre olny about half a degree warmer than the 1951-1980 normals, and the July highs actually went down (though i suppose this could be due to increased precip). This makes Roswell cooler in summe than Albuquerque.

plantmaps

01:18, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

a surprisingly clean UI at plantmaps.com helps bring up cliamte data ... probably interpolated .... for any zip code. they use the old school format with Fahrenheit only and temperatures rounded to the nearest degree. Data may be old, since they have Rangeley with a Jan low of –3. Caribou gets –1 and Presque Isle gets 0; thus hacing Caribou (and probably both) colder than the 1951-1980 data. Another possibility is that they're manually altering the temperatures downward in areas prone to cold air pooling. i suspect the site is run by just one person, essentially completing the project i had wanted to do around twenty years earlier.

Plantmaps.com actually seems to have two sets of temperature records. the cold ones are on zip code urls like https://plantmaps.com/04736 , where as the NORMAL normals have urls like https://www.plantmaps.com/en/clim/f/us/maine/caribou/climate-data .

as much as i love plantmaps, i dont think we should be using the data for temperatures. besides the interesting downward swing in winter, they have a few oddities, such as this surprisingly cold town in Nevada. This is much colder than Reno right next door with a similar elevation. Their Reno is a full 5F colder than ours, but even that is much warmer than the cold town nearby.

The HAWT western USA

79F in January in Montana at 4000ft, and 78F here.

The western counties of Montana have a transitional climate between temperate and subtropical. In some higher elevations, like Thompson Falls, winter temperatures can get almost as cold as those in Tennessee and North Carolina. In the summer, the highs are comparable to those along the Gulf Coast. Snow falls mostly in December and January, though traces can be found as late as early March.

Boise, Idaho has warmer low temperatures than Boise City, Oklahoma.

Vermont

02:27, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Burlington, VT is now warmer than Portland, Maine. This was certainly not true in the 1980s when I memorized all the old climate statistics. Burlington might even be the warmest town in the state, as it's warmer than Rutland, VT (despite its name, not in a valley) and Bennington, VT at the south end of the state.

Spain

The surprisingly late start to spring in Madrid. it seems this area may be something like the Pacific NW, in that it combines early winters with late summers.

Special:Contributions/2.30.74.67 added much climate data but frm an unreliable source that seems not to even have the same data now. It may be interpolated data like that of PRISM, which would explain why it so often seems to be close to the data found at traditional sources but never spot on, and why the data has changed in the source.

Sioux Falls is warmer than Boise in June, and no other month. They are at the same latitude and Boise is about 1400' higher up.

Madras OR

00:08, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Madras, Oregon is very cold and in the summer of 2005 apparently averaged only about 55F from June to September. It is colder than Bend, Oregon which is about 1500 ft higher up.

Its possible this is bad data but the climate overall seems cold. Some years have 50°F amplitude in summer and in 1921, the September low was just three tenths of a degree warmer than the February low (30 and 29, after rounding).,

Wyoming

Thermopolis vs Shoshoni, Wyoming ... Thermopolis is about 10F warmer all through the winter, while temperatures merge together in the summer. Thermopolis has a slight seasonal lag, which could be due to warmer soil persisting after the temperatures cool down.

Paint Rock Creek near Hyattville, Wyoming has Jan low of 21F according to PRISM, and July low of 60F. Even Thermopolis seems cold by comparison now. While I think the evidence leans against this being due to hot springs, it's still a viable theory. Chadron Creek in Nebraska is almost as warm, with an average January low of 20. While this is less impressive since its elevation is lower, it seems remarkable since that lower elevation isn't particularly low for that area of Nebraska. It seems there may be something about the lay of the land that causes cold winds to bypass an area if there are mountains or even hills facing a certain direction.

Temperatures for the two towns above are here:

It is possible that something about the land formation channels cold air towards Shoshoni, since it's colder there than at nearby Lander, Wyoming or Dubois, Wyoming, which are both in the same river valley and higher up. I don't know how else to explain it. PRISM's map places Thermopolis in a narrow string of warm temperatures, implying there's more than just this one town, while Shoshoni seems to be unusually cold for its area. This string of warm temperatures just so happens to line up with a map of active hot springs sites in Wyoming .... but maybe the hot springs are just there because that's where the terrain is lowest?

Arkansas

Hot Springs, AR vs Mount Ida and Little Rock ... i dont see much of a difference here. for some reason i had been comparing it to Fayetteville earlier which is much further north.

Colorado

Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado vs kremmling .... note that Hot Suplhur Springs had bad data which i removed, and in fact the yawning temperature gap i saw when the data was still there was what made me write this section up in the first place. thus my main reason for having this no longer applies, but thgere are still two valid examples with smaller temperature gaps above. for fun, here are the two temperature graphs for Kremmling and "bad" Hot Sulphur Springs:

Weatherbase being what it is, i can only guess if the source of their data is even in the same state. the precipitation pattern strongly suggests an eastern location, so if it's in Colorado at all it might be near the Kansas border.

Thus only the Wyoming case remains.

id/nv

Murphy Hot Springs, Idaho is much warmer than Wild Horse Reservoir, Nevada. Charleston, Nevada is eve colder. but cf 4 climates just for jarbidge nv