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Weather and Gardening Discussion

Something I've noticed far more of these days are hydrangeas. When I took horticulture class in high school, I remember the teacher saying hydrangeas were rare here, because they wouldn't survive, but I see them everywhere now. Even more extreme, I remember my grandfather saying when he was a child in the the early part of the 1900s nobody planted trees of any kind because it was believed they couldn't survive. You can see it in older pics, the city literally had no trees.

An interesting example of change related man-made changes, climate change, heat island etc.. About 15 years ago my niece got a coniferous tree from school, but she didn't have a place to plant it so, we planted it down near Nose Creek. It's still there today and is about 15 feet tall. Not as healthy as a yard tree, but still going strong, but if we had planted it 70 years ago I doubt it would have made it.
 
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JTron said:
One thing I noticed 100% is downtown and Beltline retains its heat far longer after sunset than other neighbourhoods. This goes back to the amount of concrete and asphalt I would imagine.
Anyhow, this isn’t to say climate change isn’t having an effect, because I think it’s having an effect, but that the heat island is also very real.
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This is also a big reason why we shouldn't be as focused on sunlight in planning and design, but increasingly so in shade (as a good thing).

With regularly warmer summers, longer warm seasons, more heat retention etc. - it's increasingly not always ideal that we should maximize sunlight on the street all the time, in all situations. This is a paradigm shift - essentially there's increasingly more days where it's too hot to sit outside without shade, than there are cool days where sun is required to reach a minimum comfortable limit. Patio designers take note!
 
CBBarnett said:
This is also a big reason why we shouldn't be as focused on sunlight in planning and design, but increasingly so in shade (as a good thing).

With regularly warmer summers, longer warm seasons, more heat retention etc. - it's increasingly not always ideal that we should maximize sunlight on the street all the time, in all situations. This is a paradigm shift - essentially there's increasingly more days where it's too hot to sit outside without shade, than there are cool days where sun is required to reach a minimum comfortable limit. Patio designers take note!
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Maximizing spring, fall and winter sun while minimizing summer sun. In the spring, fall and winter I always walk on the sunny side of the street in the summer unless it is morning or night, I go to the shade.
 
Yes, the lack of solar-oriented designs is a real problem across the boards.

Deciduous trees, louvers, awnings, glazing direction and structure orientation should be better considered in almost all development but it really isn't. If we design things well, we could be basking in the sun during the cool months and comfortably shaded during warmer months everywhere we go in our city. Instead we get a hodgepodge of thoughtless design creating barren cold wastelands in the winter and barren hot wastelands in the summer.
 
Surrealplaces said:
Something I've noticed far more of these days are hydrangeas. When I took horticulture class in high school, I remember the teacher saying hydrangeas were rare here, because they wouldn't survive, but I see them everywhere now. Even more extreme, I remember my grandfather saying when he was a child in the the early part of the 1900s nobody planted trees of any kind because it was believed they couldn't survive. You can see it in older pics, the city literally had no trees.
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I was in Vancouver this summer, and those are everywhere there, was actually surprised to see some in planters around the city after.
 
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From Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/CalgaryWxRecords/
 
Wild that half of those are in the last 13 years, while the other 5 are spread out over nearly a century.

The weather network has us going below freezing tonight, but if that doesn’t happen, we’ll likely make it past 160. Eight more days until the next 0 is forecast.
 
UrbanWarrior said:
Wild that half of those are in the last 13 years, while the other 5 are spread out over nearly a century.

The weather network has us going below freezing tonight, but if that doesn’t happen, we’ll likely make it past 160. Eight more days until the next 0 is forecast.
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Not that stats overrule feelings in practice, but I think of this 160+ days without a freezing temperature when I hear someone say, "who bikes or walks in Calgary? Don't they know it's 10 months of winter?!?!"

Here's some rough stats from my calculation on the weather data so far in 2024:
Daily High Below -10
15​
Daily High Below Zero
42​
Daily High Above Zero
160​
Daily High Above +30
16​

Acknowledging we have the first part of winter 2024/25 to get through, we might still end the year with more days above 30 as a high, than days with a high lower than -10. In 2023, we didn't have any days between October and December where the daily high was lower than -10.
 
trtcttc said:
I find perception of Calgary weather for those outside of the city mainly come from news story of the occasional snow fall in September and the -20/30 week in February.
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Big time. I work for an org based in Ottawa and every time there's snow in the fall, or a cold snap they always bring it up, probably because they've seen it on the news or Weather channel or something. When it's warm and sunny in January or February it doesn't make the news.

An interesting thing I've found is, I've come across people in Ottawa who say they'd like to move to Calgary but couldn't handle the harsh winters. They're always surprised when you tell them that statistically the days are warmer in Dec-Mar, and that there are fair number of days with a high above zero.

Aside from the sunlight or Chinooks, the biggest difference to me is the dampness. 10C in Ottawa feels a lot colder than 10C in Calgary. This week it's been around 8-14C and I've been freezing my butt off. I can't seem to get warm.
 
Yeah Calgarys winters are way less harsh than Ottawa’s. Way more days above zero, and double the sun. Even just the sun aspect makes the winters here better than most places across the country.
 
I grew up in Ottawa and was really surprised by the extremely mild winter when I moved here (to be fair, the year we moved here happened to be one of our best-ever El Ninos so we basically skipped winter that year). Ottawa winters are snowy, grey, damp and statistically colder than ours on average. Our winter average temps and snowfall are closer to Toronto's than they are to Ottawa's, although subject to much lower (and higher) extremes which probably makes it feel much more like a winter city.

I heard years ago that in an average year, there are only 30 days where the high doesn't at least hit zero in Calgary. That basically means in an average year, there is only a month of what I would consider proper Canadian winter. Obviously, as all Calgarians know "average" is a deceptive term in a city whose winter climate can emulate Phoenix's or Timmins' depending on the year, but its a helpful reminder as we move towards those colder months that our winters aren't really that bad.
 
The streak is over, we fell to -0.9 at 8 am.

Record 159 days.

I wonder what our record for days above biological zero (5°) is? 🤔
 
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