{"id":21370,"date":"2019-08-19T14:15:43","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T18:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=21370"},"modified":"2019-10-19T08:20:59","modified_gmt":"2019-10-19T12:20:59","slug":"taking-off-3-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/taking-off-3-weather\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Off #3: Weather"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image:<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: monthly weather averages for the 30 proposed destination cities in our 2020 “EuroTour.” (Details below.) Click for a larger version.]<\/em><\/p>\nA<\/span>s The Missus and I think about where in Europe we’d like to visit, an obvious corollary is: “…and when?”<\/p>\n

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-<\/del>two-month window. Ergo, we assume, we’ll depart these shores sometime in June<\/del> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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