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It becomes like a broken record trying to explain to people why winter is what matters, and not summer. If only a warm or hot summer mattered, my area would be crawling with palms. There are no palms here.
Cape Hatteras will eventually get the brutal cold it has gotten in the past. No palms will survive that, or maybe only the most hardy. Meanwhile Hobart will never veer more than a few degrees off of its average winter low temps. So Hobart wins by far.
Does Hobart ever get or has ever gotten a temp anomaly of negative 35F or even 25F below their avg low temp. Yeah right. Impossible.
I'm shocked people on here actually think Hatteras can beat Hobart or even come close in the palm growing department.
Dude, just move to Australia and get it over with. You constantly complain about North America's climate, how much it sucks, etc. etc. Just move there and get it over with so you're not so miserable.
It becomes like a broken record trying to explain to people why winter is what matters, and not summer. If only a warm or hot summer mattered, my area would be crawling with palms. There are no palms here.
Cape Hatteras will eventually get the brutal cold it has gotten in the past. No palms will survive that, or maybe only the most hardy. Meanwhile Hobart will never veer more than a few degrees off of its average winter low temps. So Hobart wins by far.
Does Hobart ever get or has ever gotten a temp anomaly of negative 35F or even 25F below their avg low temp. Yeah right. Impossible.
I'm shocked people on here actually think Hatteras can beat Hobart or even come close in the palm growing department.
Record lows are not entirely what matters. For all the complaints we've given about the flux of the southeast it works 2 ways. If the jet stream spikes up mid-winter it can be very warm in the South. I remember being in Charleston, SC when it was 75 degrees and sunny one day in mid-January. My relatives were concurrently getting pounded with over a foot of snow in New Jersey with lows in the single digits. Most cold in the southeast is due to a sudden dip in the jet stream which is often followed quickly by a sudden peak, making the cold snaps very short in duration. So a 9 degree low will be followed quickly by a 68 degree day in many cases. It's far greener even in my zone 7b region of Raleigh mid winter due to the pines than anywhere in the northeast. Coastal NC supports several palms and broadleaf plants all winter easily. I've even seen dates around Cape Fear even though its only an 8A because its usually just so much warmer. Bright sunshine and warmer day temperatures can have a huge effect on plant hardiness as well.
Perhaps you should move out of the northeast. I hated the 7 months of brown, smelly pollution, high housing costs, and traffic myself. Come South you'll be pleased. If you don't want four seasons or arctic blasts you can try Gulf cities like Houston or New Orleans or Florida. California is also a consideration if you are college educated and can make a high salary to afford it. And the climate in areas like San Jose, San Diego and Los Angeles is very stable and you can grow a large variety of subtropical plants.
It becomes like a broken record trying to explain to people why winter is what matters, and not summer. If only a warm or hot summer mattered, my area would be crawling with palms. There are no palms here.
Cape Hatteras will eventually get the brutal cold it has gotten in the past. No palms will survive that, or maybe only the most hardy. Meanwhile Hobart will never veer more than a few degrees off of its average winter low temps. So Hobart wins by far.
Does Hobart ever get or has ever gotten a temp anomaly of negative 35F or even 25F below their avg low temp. Yeah right. Impossible.
I'm shocked people on here actually think Hatteras can beat Hobart or even come close in the palm growing department.
if we go by your idea of subtropical only Miami would be subtropical in north America. also you seem to only look at extreme record lows not on what on average happens every year. stop complaining dude life's too short, the weather these past 2 years sucks terribly but complaining wont cool down the pacific water at all. how are you so sure these next few years will resemble the 70s and 80s? how do you know that period of time was not just some freak event that never happened before and has extremely low odds of happening again. I once read an article that said colonists reported seeing palms in southern Virginia when they first came to the Americas that tells me the south is far more subtropical than you think.
Dude, just move to Australia and get it over with. You constantly complain about North America's climate, how much it sucks, etc. etc. Just move there and get it over with so you're not so miserable.
It is not just Australia. Most of the world doesn't experience the crazy extremes we get here. They do get them, but just not on the regular basis we seem to.
Just for some perspective on the variability of Hatteras, and how far it goes below its avg and how often here is data from 1905-2015:
1905-1919 top three coldest low temps 11F, 15F,17F
1920-1939 - 16,17,18F
1940-1959 - 14,18, 19F
1960-1979 - 12F, 13F, 15F
1980-1999 - 6F, 11F, 12F The daddy of all cold periods in the eastern US
2000-2015 - 13F, 18F, 20F.
The 13F in 2015 is the coldest since 1985. That is why I say we are returning to a very cold period in the east.
The "average" low temp for the period 1905-2015 for Dec is 42.3F, Jan= 39.4F, and Feb = 39.4F.
Every 20 years has at least an anomaly of 23F, but usually much more than that. The avg is 27.4F anomaly every twenty years. Good luck growing and maintaining any tender subtropical vegetation with drops like that. The avg low of 39.4 could support loads of palms, the twenty decade avg extreme min of 12F not so much.
And where in Australia, Argentina, Western Europe, East Asia, etc. has this kind of departure this often from the avg low temp on an island sticking out in the ocean? Inland southern locations are much higher on the departures. Even Savannah is higher in departure than this. Lowest temp there was 3F vs the 6F in Hatteras.
Last edited by tom77falcons; 04-22-2015 at 08:51 AM..
It the case of palm trees, record lows are entirely what matters.
That's why Hobart has many more palm species growing there, than Cape Hatteras does.
For all those posters who picked Cape Hatteras as having more species -this is kind of like arguing that Southern California gets a better fall display than Massachusetts.
Gardening culture. The oldest Queen palm in this area would only be 15 years old, yet they grow quickly here.
I've never seen a Sabal palms here until two years ago, but the one I bought, has produced about 8 fronds in that time, despite the sheep eating it just about to ground level - and my winters are colder than Hobart's and summers the same as Hobart's.
It the case of palm trees in these two locations, record lows are entirely what matters.
That's why Hobart has many more palm species growing there, than Cape Hatteras does.
On a forum like this dedicated to weather, vegetation is obviously unimportant to most on here. Not to me. It makes a huge difference in the mental feel of a climate if you see very green foliage in winter lets say.
A climate that has lots of green in winter is obviously more mild than a dead brown leafless landscape. But folks on here aren't as interested in the vegetative look. However, on the gardening forum, people are in awe of the other subtropical climates in the world where record lows or the extremes don't severly limit what can be grown in an otherwise mild climate.
On other forums about gardening, people from your part of the world and Europe usually express sympathy towards the US South when they hear what can and can't be grown. Most places in the world with an avg Jan low of 40F are usually zone 10 or 9b. Not here. Here they are 8b or barely 9a (20F). The difference between what can grow in zone 9b vs 8b is quite a large number.
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