This is a new climate I've created which is originally based on Atlanta's climate, though modified beyond all recognition. This climate, belonging to a fictional city named Lucenum, also represents my personal version of what a "mild and sunny climate" looks like.
Lucenum has generally mild, sunny, and dry winters. Daytime temperatures are balmy (usually around 50F) and nights are typically below freezing. Swings during winter are relatively gentle. Warmups typically feature highs in the 60's, and on rare occasions above 70F. Cold snaps typically come in the form of especially intense radiational cooling nights - the coldest nights of the winter are typically around 10F, with temperatures around 0F seen on rare occasions. When this occurs the daytime temperatures are typically closer to normal than the lows (such as a 10/40F day), and this is how Lucenum gets its primary form of winter chill. Wintertime precipitation is sparse but significant, and is rather evenly divided between rain and snow. A typical winter month features about a quarter of an inch of rain, which typically comes from a few rainy days.
Each winter month also usually features a small amount of snowfall, adding up to around 5 inches per season, though this total can vary quite a bit. Each month's snow typically comes from a single storm that drops an inch or two of snow at night. Daytime snow does occasionally occur, but is typically wetter snow that produces smaller accumulations. Powdery snow is just as typical as wet snow in nighttime storms, since nighttime temperatures during a snowstorm can be as low as 20F. Daytime snows produce the coldest high temperatures in Lucenum, which hover just above freezing. High temperatures below freezing are rare. These warm high temperatures combined with strong and abundant sunshine means that any accumulation of snow here is short-lived. Snow lasting more than a few days is an exceptional occurrence. Furthermore, a typical snowfall will have melted into nothing more than patches in the shade by the following evening.
Snow outside of the winter months is very rare, with the exception of trace amounts that sometimes fall in November or March.
Summer is the other major season here, and is mild, sunny, but also wet. High temperatures are usually in the 60's during summertime, with lows around 50F. For foliage on the trees, Spring usually arrives in April, but there is no real transition to Summer here (daily means are below 60F in every month), so the progress of Spring once it begins is quite slow and in many respects doesn't really end until Autumn arrives at the end of October. Temperatures during summer are more stable than in winter, typically staying close to average, but summer is also prone to the same kind of warmups and cooldowns that characterize winter. The coldest nights of the summer are usually around 40F and the hottest days are around 80F. On rare occasions heat waves have sent temperatures as high as 91F, and cold snaps have produced ground frost.
Against this backdrop of mild temperatures in summer, there is usually persistent scattered showers and occasionally thunderstorms, which are sort of a cooler/weaker version of the pop-up thunderstorm activity seen in the tropics. In-between showers it's usually sunny, which accounts for the high sunshine totals. Rainfall amounts are typically not more than a quarter of an inch, but many days of light showers added up means that totals of 4-5 inches per month are typical for June, July, and August.
Dew points typically are 45-60F during the summer months and 10-30F during the drier winter months. This influx of dry air vs. humid air as well as the rainfall pattern produce a monsoonal climate for Lucenum.
Its Koeppen classification is
Cwb, which is a dry-winter subtropical highland climate. Trewartha classifies this as a Do climate, which corresponds to the oceanic or highland type (highland type would have a classification of HDo). The
Holdridge Life Zone for Lucenum is a cool temperate moist forest.
As for myself, I give this climate a
C. It's mild year-round, so it has nice summers but pretty much no winter. The excessive sunshine is a minus, but the plus of the record highs (all-time high of 91F) evens that out.
The story of this climate is more interesting than most, because it was created when I was daydreaming while sitting in a grocery store parking lot (weird, I know, but it happens) about subtropical climates and highland climates. I thought that it would be neat to take Atlanta's climate, which is a distinct variety of subtropical climate, and turn "Hotlanta" into "Mildlanta", thus making it more similar to Tibet and possibly more appealing to wannabe Sun Belters. The winters are inspired by the weather that the real-life Atlanta experienced in December 2010, and I thought that sunny and dry weather would ameliorate the chilly nights for warm and mild weather fans, something like the effect that Denver's sunny/dry winters have in real-life. The radiational cooling nights that I added in add some chill to the air, and (rather paradoxically) the quick-melting snow enhances the mild winter feel.
For the sake of the plants, gardeners, as well having a change of pace, I thought that more summer rainfall coming in the form of showery rains would be a good extra feature. It came out to exactly 26 inches per year, which is a moderate precip figure. Sunshine hours came out to a blinding 3176 hours of sun per year, which is satisfactory to pretty much all sunshine fans. I decided to make the temperatures in summer mild and warm but still comfortable to me, so I arrived at 69/50F for the average. The end result was a ho-hum C-grade mild climate from my perspective. I'd like to know how the other people here rate it.
-------------------------------
Text Backup in case of link rot with the image. All temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit:
Month: High/Low, Record High, Record Low, Precipitation, Snowfall, Sun hours
Jan: 48/25, 75, -5, 0.47 in, 2.0 in, 257 hrs
Feb: 51/29, 78, -1, 0.41 in, 1.5 in, 254 hrs
Mar: 57/35, 83, 8, 0.36 in, 0.1 in, 306 hrs
Apr: 61/41, 85, 21, 1.36 in, 0.0 in, 271 hrs
May: 63/43, 86, 29, 3.09 in, 0.0 in, 284 hrs
Jun: 66/47, 91, 33, 4.12 in, 0.0 in, 275 hrs
Jul: 69/50, 90, 35, 4.88 in, 0.0 in, 281 hrs
Aug: 68/49, 88, 34, 4.01 in, 0.0 in, 282 hrs
Sep: 66/45, 87, 28, 3.05 in, 0.0 in, 253 hrs
Oct: 62/42, 83, 20, 2.36 in, 0.0 in, 240 hrs
Nov: 56/36, 79, 7, 1.44 in, 0.2 in, 228 hrs
Dec: 50/28, 73, -4, 0.45 in, 1.0 in, 245 hrs
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
