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.
Coldest places outside Antarctica, with the highest temperature range in the world, which is a plausible criteria for "most continental". However, their summers are only moderately warm, which goes against the "really hot in summer" idea of a continental climate. Relatively nearby Yakutsk could be a better candidate due to moderately warmer summers, even though the slightly less frigid winters gives an absolute lower range of temperatures.
Extremely hot summers (July highs average just under 40C) combined with cold winters (-12C average low in January). A large range which spans both "really hot" and "really cold", although maybe the cold isn't quite as low as it could be for the title.
Winnipeg or something in the area could be a justifiable candidate, even though the range of temperatures isn't quite as high as the others, because it has a more even balance of extreme hot and extreme cold. Also, I think the humidity is higher around there than the other candidates.
The obvious mid-latitude winner is Karamay: it has summer means above 25C and winter means below -10C. The July avg high is around 35C and the January average low is around -20C.
Oymyakon or somewhere else in Siberia, without a doubt.
The biggest range is the most continental.
Not necessarily, most of these climates mentioned are for the most part wintry cold, with a brief window of warm weather.
Only Turpan has some semblance of shoulder seasons, as well as massive differences between the seasons, so gets my vote.
Yup the likes of Turpan, and especially Karamay, are very impressive, ranging from bitter cold (well, for the latter) to big time heat (moreso the former). 20°C+ avg lows for all three summer months and an average high below -10°C in January! But the annual range is still about 20°C wider in Yakutia than in western China, which is a lot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by improb
KAramay is impressive, the shoulder seasons must be really interesting there. It could reach temp in the 30s one day and freezing ones the day after.
I pick Verkhoyansk myself, because it has the largest annual variation and still features all four seasons, albeit with truncated shoulder seasons usually lasting a few weeks.
If you mean continentality, Erzurum isn't even close - a range of between 24/6F and 80/52F is comparable to Chicago, which does have four seasons but isn't even close to even the most continental climate on its continent, let alone the world - below is a map of an index of continentality, which is a function of annual temperature range adjusted for latitude (because other geography being equal higher latitudes have greater range due to higher solar variation) for the U.S. and southern Canada:
Below is another map using the same methodology for the whole world (the high-continentality equatorial regions are spurious artifacts of low latitude numbers being inputted to the equation). You can clearly see that Yakutia is the most continental part of the world versus what would normally be expected for its latitude. Other features that jump out is the west coast of Europe generally being more maritime than the west coast of North America at the same latitude, how intensely maritime the southern tip of South America is*, and Australia's Outback being a bit more continental than one might think. One should also note how eastern North America's climate is made more maritime by the Great Lakes - in China and Korea the interior-type continentality extends all the way to the coast.
*Which isn't much of a surprise - it's blocked from receiving much in the way of continental polar air masses, and it's a narrow strip of land that happens to be the only region on Earth that's downwind of maritime weather that circles the globe uninterrupted by other land masses.
(because other geography being equal higher latitudes have greater range due to higher solar variation)
Why is the solar variation higher with higher latitudes? I'm no expert but I have thought the difference between the highest and lowest solar angle (at solar noon on Jun 21 and Dec 21) is the same from the tropic of cancer to the polar circle (about 46.9°), and even smaller north of the arctic circle.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.