Taking Off #3: Weather

[Image: monthly weather averages for the 30 proposed destination cities in our 2020 “EuroTour.” (Details below.) Click for a larger version.]

As The Missus and I think about where in Europe we’d like to visit, an obvious corollary is: “…and when?”

To some extent, we’re constrained by our personal calendar. We both retire in March, and our lease is up in June, but we’ve got a few family visits in mind in that little three-two-month window. Ergo, we assume, we’ll depart these shores sometime in June late May. But with thirty possible cities, scattered all over what’s currently still lumpable together as “Europe,” where to head first? and where second? …and so on.

When one has been working with software as long as I have, one tends to consider thorny questions in terms of data. The data which I think drives an answer to this question: the weather we can expect to encounter.

I started by building a spreadsheet, one row per city, with one column per month between June and January. (We’re not likely to stay that long, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room at the tail end.) Each of those monthly columns was further divided into three columns: average high temperature, average low temperature, and average rain days. I also added a three-column group for “annual” averages of those three figures, across that eight-month period. And for comparison’s sake, I threw in rows for a half-dozen US cities with whose weather we were familiar. (This enables us to observe, for example, “In terms of its average weather, Bath in June resembles Philadelphia in October.”)

When I looked at what I had in the spreadsheet, I confess I felt overwhelmed. So I imported the whole thing into a little database program; from there I could generate a “report” of it all, with color-codings and other ways to highlight information of interest. The result I exported to PDF (converted to a .jpg image) in for display as the image above.

The color coding for the temperature and rain-days figures is explained in a legend at the bottom center. Other things to notice:

• The six months we’ll most likely be traveling (June-November) are boxed with a heavy black line.
• Three green rectangular boxes start at the top left and then kind of march down and to the right. There’s no magic data analysis going on with those boxes: the rows enclosed in each are those in each proposed “leg” of the tour — British Isles, northern Europe, southern Europe — and the columns cover the approximate range of months we’d be doing that “leg.” [Aside: I really want a better word than “leg.” Ideas?]
• The green boxes overlap at their ends, because we don’t (yet? ever?) know exactly when we’ll hop off from one portion of the itinerary to the next.
• One interesting thing about those three boxes: across all three of them, we wouldn’t expect to encounter any really severe differences in weather — that is, we only have to pack for one sorta-kinda-the-same climate. This should simplify packing, and make less worrisome the moving around from one region to another.

Of course, the best-laid plans, etc. etc. Famous last words, so on and so forth. If you want the gods to laugh, tell them your plans — all that. But we’ve got to start making some assumptions, on which we can build further assumptions, and so on.