Tuesday, January 2, 2018

December 2017 Summary


A cold and dry December

For almost the entire first week, December was pretty warm with some double digit temperatures, however things then got somewhat colder before getting really cold.  So cold that during the last 6 days of the month, the daily high temperatures didn’t even get above the average daily low temperatures for those days.

Overall it was a bit more than 3 degrees below average making it the coldest December since 2000, while the cold streak at the end of the month might turn out to be one of the longest we have seen in the history of records in the region (but more on that next month).

The colder temperatures meant that most of the snow that fell remained on the ground at the end of the month.  However, this might have masked the fact that we didn’t get that much precipitation during December with only 32.0 mm compared to the average of 71.2 mm.

As far as snowfall, we had 31 cm which was just a little less than the average of 37.2 cm for the month.

Summary for December 2017:
Maximum Temperature 10.6°C
Minimum Temperature -28.1°C
Average Daily High Temperature -2.3°C (Long term average 0.2°C)
Average Daily Low Temperature -10.8°C (Long term average -6.8°C)
Total Precipitation 32.0 mm (Long term average 71.2 mm)


(Long term averages based on 1981-2010 data for the Waterloo-Wellington Airport)



3 comments:

Andrew said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrew said...

Great summary!
Waterloo weighted average temperature for was 8.25C in 2017 and 8.85C in 2016. (excluding times returning erroneous data)
I wonder if you can do a better comparison year of year using the average for the day with the average based on the 15 minute increments.

Given the following sets representing various days of temperatures:
A[13,12,11,10,10,9,10,12,14,15,17,18,19,22,24,24,24,25,21,20,19,18,18,14]
B[25,25,25,25,25,9,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25,25]
C[13,13,13,9,13,13,13,13,13,13,13,13,13,14,18,19,19,25,22,18,13,13,13,13]

The average daily temperature taking the min/max temps: All days are 17C
The average daily temperature taking the average based on hour: A = 16.63C, B = 24.33C, C=14.67C

As you can see, there is a major difference between average daily temperatures in how they're calculated.

Is Waterloo cooling or warming? What is the daily average temperature for Waterloo using the average daily using the hourly method?

Anonymous said...

Anybody remember December 2000?