This climate is a creation of mine to explore what a climate with an extremely high daily range would look like. Schist Band is located on an alien planet with less mass and thinner air than Earth; other local factors are also present to enhance daily range. Schist Band belongs to an elite club of climates that routinely reach 104F/40C on a summer afternoon yet drop to near freezing by sunrise. This is just what Schist Band averages in July - an incredible 40C/72F daily range. Besides the bipolar temperatures, Schist Band is also dry and sunny in summer, averaging 350 hours of sunshine per month and only 0.15 inches of precipitation per month. This precipitation falls in the form of convective thunderstorms; these storms are widely scattered across the region on any given summer afternoon. Occasionally a shower or thunderstorm will form at night or in the morning when it's cold enough for snow, thus there is typically a light summer snow every few years that is long gone by lunchtime, yielding the 0.1 inch average figure.
Winter here is similarly bipolar, but there is an influx of cloud cover and precipitation that cut down on the daily range (39F range in January). There are still a few sunny days, though, and even a typical rainy/snowy day will have several periods of sunshine. Days with no sunshine at all are rare. During a typical day snow will fall during the morning, accumulating several inches, then as the temperature warms up rain will fall, turning back to snow sometime during the evening. Only a few snows per year last a full day, but the constant influx of moisture combined with cyclic cold create a very respectable snowfall figure of 35 inches per month in winter, totaling 156 inches for the whole season. In short, winters consist of showery precipitation that comes in the form of rain during the day and snow during the night.
Spring and Autumn don't really have a distinctive character, basically being transition seasons between the summer and winter patterns. Temperatures in Schist Band don't usually stray too far from average. What you see here is what you will get on most days, plus or minus a few degrees. Below are the averages:
The Koeppen classification for this climate is
Csb, or Warm Summer Mediterranean. Trewartha classifies it as
DCb, which corresponds to the Warm Summer Humid Continental (or hemiboreal) climate. The Holdridge Life Zone for this climate is a cool temperate moist forest.
I usually agree with Koeppen, but this is one of the exceptions. I think this is a climate that is too weird for any Earthly classification system to capture. Although it falls in the temperate/oceanic category based on mean temperature, the high daily range makes it temperate in name only. It is an open question how the native vegetation would adapt to a growing season where it's 40C by day and freezing by night. Surely whatever plants that grow there would have to be hardy to both cold and heat, though I would think the fact that it's 30F at night as opposed to 0F would help a bit.
Believe it or not I actually kind of like this climate. Although it is far too warm during the day in winter, and the snowpack melting every day would be a real downer, the almost guaranteed powdery snowfall at night is a draw. 156 inches is 156 inches. Although the summer days would induce heat stroke, it is cool enough at night to sleep very comfortably despite the 40C heat during the day. The freezing air at sunrise each day would be very refreshing after facing down the hot sunshine the previous day. The 104F afternoons would be terrific for outdoor swimming, and this is one of the few climates where I could swim outside every day (in an unheated pool) and be able to sleep comfortably at night and be comfortable in the morning. Needless to day there is a cool factor that goes with this unusual climate. The sunshine figure is too high for my taste, but the precipitation figure looks okay. I will give this one a
B-.
I'll be interested to see your rating, but I'd just like to point out one advantage to you all - this is probably the only climate (fictional or otherwise) that has ever been posted on this forum that features 40C temperatures yet doesn't require air conditioning. I imagine if you had very good insulation and let the cold air flow into the house in the morning a comfortable temperature could be maintained all afternoon (or at least most of the afternoon).
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