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| Rio, unsurprisingly, has one of the best climates in the world |
This is the fifth post
in my “Perfect Climate” series. To check out the first four, use the
following links:
Also check out Conroy’s Perfect Climate Rankings page.
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One thing to note regarding the “warm cities” ranking, in my original formula I assumed that the higher the annual mean temperature the better. I was examining American cities the warmest of which is Honolulu, Hawaii with an annual mean of 77.5 degrees. However, when I expanded my rankings to encompass all the world’s cities, I ran into a problem: much of the Earth is very hot. Many cities across Africa and Asia have annual mean temperatures that exceed 80 degrees. While I enjoy warm conditions, even I have to admit that there’s an upper limit above which the climate grows too hot. I decided to modify my original formula to penalize cities where the annual mean temperature exceeds 78 degrees [2]. This adjustment works the same as the temperature penalty applied in the alternative (temperate) climate formula for cities with annual mean temperatures above 65 degrees (see Part 4).
The World’s Climate
Before jumping to the actual rankings, I'll note a few general impressions from my review of climates for hundreds of places in all parts of the world.
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| Latitude and elevation combine to give Nairobi a pleasant climate |
- Large portions of South America, Africa, and Asia are located at low latitudes but relatively high elevations. This combination of tropical locations perched well above sea level is a magic formula for a favorable climate. The tropical latitude results in consistent solar radiation throughout the year, which means little temperature variance, but the higher elevations moderate the temperature. Cities in these zones include Nairobi, Sao Paulo, and Bangalore, India. Each boasts a climate that would be far hotter (and far less bearable) if located near sea level.
- It’s surprising how few large cities are located in really cold places. Only six cities experience mean low temperatures in the single digits (F) during one or more winter months: Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ottawa, Montreal, and Edmonton, Canada, and Shenyang and Harbin, China. Indeed, Harbin (China's tenth largest city), in the far northeast of China right on the edge of Siberia, is the only major global city to experience mean low temperatures below zero (F) for any month of the year. It’s appropriately nicknamed the “Ice City”, and the winter cold there is worse than in Arctic places like Nome, Alaska. This relative paucity of large cities in places with harsh winters is another demonstration that the great majority of people the world over choose not to live in cold climates.
- Conversely, cities with average high temperatures above 100 degrees during one or more summer months are common across the American southwest, Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The highest monthly mean temperature for any major city belongs to Baghdad, Iraq where the July high is a heat-stroke-inducing 111 degrees. That’s nearly as hot as Death Valley during high summer. Other "hot" cities include Phoenix, Riyadh, Delhi, and Khartoum. In fact, the capital of Sudan has the highest annual mean temperature of any major city at 85.8 degrees. (It's worth noting that I developed this climate system thinking of the U.S. where air conditioning is ubiquitous. That's certainly not the case through the "hot" world, so the warm rankings should be considered with that in mind; warm may not be so pleasant where it can't be escaped.)
- Perhaps the continent with the most consistently superb climate is South America. All of that continent’s major cities score well on both the warm and temperate rankings. And of all nations, Brazil’s big cities boast almost universally excellent climates. This is also true of the other large southern hemisphere country, Australia, where all of its large cities also have friendly climates. This is a major contrast to the large nations of the northern hemisphere that are either cold (Canada and Russia) or feature widely varying climates (U.S. and China).
- If you’re interested in finding unvarying temperatures, then follow the Equator. Quito, Ecuador, Manaus and Belem, Brazil, Male in the Maldives, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Brunei all lie on or near the Equator and are among the relatively short list of cities that have annual temperature variances of less than 3 degrees.
- Finally, it’s interesting to compare the most extreme climate on Earth to my climate rankings. Russia’s Vostok Station in Antarctica is renowned as the coldest place on the planet, the Pole of Cold [3]. The lowest ever measured surface temperature of -128.6 degrees was recorded there in 1983. The average August low temperature is -97 degrees, and it earns a climate score of -105. The temperatures at Vostok are comparable to the surface of Mars in winter. It puts things into perspective when evaluating the “perfect” and “terrible” climates across the globe. Harbin's climate is far closer to sunny Rio de Janeiro's than it is to interior Antarctica.
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| Ice sculptures in Harbin, the world's coldest big city |
Now on to the rankings.
