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The USDA zone is designed for commercial agriculture secondary use for personal gardening. Commercial agriculture is not taking place in downtown Charleston nor on Tybee island at any scale. Determining the microzones there is just for fun. If there is a 100 meter stretch on the beach that rarely freezes but the rest of the area gets to 20f every other winter, that's neat but not as relevant to the general climate of the region.
Crops will be grown in places much more like the airport or further inland. For personal gardening, you can take advantage of microclimates and even create submicroclimates with landscaping and water features to boost the growable range of sensitive plants. For commercial agriculture, I think even one year in ten with <20f is enough to scare anyone serious from growing say 9b fruit bearing trees in that climate. Nevermind 10a, it would be unthinkable to do that for commercial agriculture when there are far safer places to grow them. Not to say that a true 10a place will never have a temperature below freezing. Central FL citrus country is full of horror stories about it.. But on the other hand, I don't think someone will grow a 9b plant commercially in Charleston or Tybee Island, even if there was cheap
Exactly, that fits very well with my premise that these USDA zones are good for the fun in these places.
For Charleston, Tybee Island, etc, the median low is best for that reason plus nobody gardening there.
Like I said, that's how the US one is best used (as a guide for weather monitors to know what the lowest temperature to expect is) because it is insufficient relative to a proper one like the Canadian method. I can't understand how to use the formula for that one though.
Even if the USDA hardiness zones were sufficient, for Charleston and Tybee Island they do not apply in that manner because of the small area (as was stated before by Space_League).
So median is once again best for them since they are only good for fun.
Like I said, that's how the US one is best used because it is insufficient relative to a proper one like the Canadian method. I can't understand how to use the formula for that one though.
You don't get to choose though. There's a definition.
You don't get to choose though. There's a definition.
A definition that does not work, because it only takes into account the lowest temperature and nothing more.
And again, even if it did, the definition does not apply to the subjects of the matter. So even if we give it the time of day, the median takes precedence over the mean for Charleston and Tybee Island since nobody grows commercial crops there but anybody can monitor the weather.
I don't think mean or median is a good way to determine the zone. Mean because if the pattern is like 35, 32, 15, 44, 41, 13 the mean is 30 which is too high. The median of 33.5 is also too high.
Median + counting the days actually seems like a reasonable one to me. The median lowest low each year can vary wildly year to year based on ENSO and other factors, and ends up overestimating even more than the mean. Instead just find the 30 coldest lows in the past 30 years then take the median of that as the zone
I don't think mean or median is a good way to determine the zone. Mean because if the pattern is like 35, 32, 15, 44, 41, 13 the mean is 30 which is too high. The median of 33.5 is also too high.
Median + counting the days actually seems like a reasonable one to me. The median lowest low each year can vary wildly year to year based on ENSO and other factors, and ends up overestimating even more than the mean. Instead just find the 30 coldest lows in the past 30 years then take the median of that as the zone
Oh my, looks like I was mixing up median and mode!
Every time I said median I meant mode. That is what my comments referred to, most winters not going below a given temperature.
Oh my, looks like I was mixing up median and mode!
Every time I said median I meant mode. That is what my comments referred to, most winters not going below a given temperature.
I think you still meant median though. Since mode would be like:
the mode would be 20 which is too low in this example. The mode will pick a random number too often
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