Everywhere you go you hear people say, “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait ten minutes and it’ll change.” As though where they live is the only place with variable weather. But who really has the right to say this? I leave it to you to decide what constitutes variability, but I’d suggest a frequency of noticeable day-to-day changes, i.e., sunny-rainy, rainy-sunny, and significant temperature difference. –Doug Stewart, Dallas
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Oh, pish-tush, Dougie. If we start going with this sunny-rainy stuff, everybody will think they qualify. Even the British, for God’s sake, who complain about the violence of nature when the temperature climbs into the 80s. The Brits, in fact, sometimes say of their weather that it’s like having “four seasons in a day.” Does this mean they have blizzards alternating with 100-degree heat waves? Not at all. It means sometimes it’s stormy and then the sun comes out, a characteristic of many maritime climates. Whoopie.
But the real hallmark is the startling swings of temperature. On January 12, 1911, the temperature in Rapid City, South Dakota, fell from 49 degrees Fahrenheit at 6 AM to 13 below zero at 8 AM, a drop of 62 degrees in two hours. In November that year the temperature in Kansas City, Missouri, dropped from 76 degrees at 10:30 AM to 10 degrees at midnight and 7 degrees the next morning.
At this point I’m sometimes tempted to launch into (3) the PhD-thesis version, which comes complete with wavelengths, angstroms, and electron shells, but invariably the host’s eyes start to glaze over and I find myself swiftly segueing into the latest on Rocky and Bullwinkle. Being the world’s smartest human is all very well, but even I know when to quit.
