A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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I find that so crazy. I'm German and for us Italy is always the sunny south where it gets much too hot for us. The USA iseems more like us climate-wise. I'd always thought New York would be a little like Berlin. Crazy to see how far south most of the US actually is.
AMOC doing some heavy lifiting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
Also the Mediterranean acts like a huge heat buffer. It basically stops the polar winds from reaching southern Europe.
In addition to there being a huge mountain range in the way. The Alps block/slow down a lot of the cold air currents that do make their way down from the polar regions. That's why cities like Turin and Milan still have cold climates in the north. Cold air still makes it's way over the Alps but is slowed and is reheated as it travels south so cities like Genoa/Florence/Rome are much milder in the winter.
A large part of it is also simply the fact that at the midlatitudes westerlies dominate, which means that western Europe receives mild air from the ocean, while the US east cost receives more extreme weather from the continent.
That one is getting phased out though.
Yeah I've been getting deprecation warnings about that every time I start ./the-beach
It still has a runtime dependency on AMOC
The crazy bit is how far north Europe is, relative to the climate we get. Almost everywhere else this far north is freezing
Imagine the chaos in Europe if the ocean currents fail to bring warm temps up from the tropics and the UK, Germany, etc all start to get weather similar to mid-northern Canada which even Canadians try their best to avoid.
The US is fucking huge. A lot of our weather up north is closer to yours, but we've got deserts, rainforests, Florida is just outside of the tropics, etc. There's a huge variety of climates here. The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin. East to west it's wider than Lisbon, Spain to Moscow, Russia. North to South it's pretty much identical to Europe. (Technically Europe is slightly larger with the Scandinavian countries sticking out pretty far north.)
The US is fucking huge...The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin
It is hilarious to imagine if this were real. Like what would European explorers and Settlers have done if they started mapping it out and went "wait a minute..."
Lisbon is in Portugal btw. (But that doesn't change the distances.)
Shit, you're right. Too much EU5 playing as Castile, and then Spain, capturing Portugal.
I like to point out that New York to LA os essentially the same distance as Moscow to Lisbon, while Seattle to Miami os about the same as London to Baghdad. That's why St. Louis was the furthest west MLB team until the 50's. The logistics for US sports are insane
The weather in New England and upper New York is very much like German weather, and sometimes worse. We’ve had snow on the grounds since the 30th of November and it’s only barely reached 0C in the last week.
It was -15C a couple nights ago at roughly the latitude of Rome, next to the ocean too. And only about 50km northwest (inland) it went down to -25C.
This has been a colder December than average for the last decade, but we have mountains that regularly get meters of snow each winter, and they are way lower elevation than the alps too. Also as we all know the last decade has been stoopid warm.
Mt Washington has measured the highest wind speed in the world.
Ocean currents do a lot more to even out the weather
Yeah thank you to the gulf stream. Too bad that global warming will make it disappear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also wind patterns. At the midlatitudes westerlies dominate. So the east coast has a continental climate (receives cold air in the winters, hot air in the summers) while the west coast does not (the oceans make the summers and winters mild)
You'll see that the west coast cities on the same latitudes of their European counterparts have a very similar climate (as opposed to east coast cities, which have a very different climate than their latitude-counterpart).
This is also a really great illustration of colorblindness. I actually didn't even see Italy until I read the comment about the boot.
Thanks, didn't realize until I read this lol
I was just thinking about this regarding climate the other day and found this interesting graphic on climate similarities in North America.
Were they limited in colours?
More than 4 colours? In this economy?
Too many colors on a map looks busy, as long as none are touching with the same color then it's good. In fact, the fewest number of colors you can use without any touching is usually the best
Everybody's wrapped up in the climate / weather discussion, but the thing that surprised me a bit more was the difference in sunset / sunrise.
I was working on an international team (i.e. a bunch of Americans + one dude from France).
Back in those ancient times, video calls with everybody's face included weren't necessarily the standard, and even when we did them, everyone was typically in an office environment.
Anyway, one late afternoon (for us in the USA) we did a team video call and our French counterpart was sitting outdoors in his back yard and it was still light outside. Although we knew it was 10 p.m. where he lived, it looked closer to the amount of sunlight we'd typically see around 7 or maybe 8 p.m. here in mid-latitude US.
It was kind of interesting, because even in the height of summer at the very highest elevations, it's going to be very dark here at 10 p.m.
Location in the time zone is also a factor. France is near the far west of CEST.
For example Michigan is in the far west of EST. The sun rises 30-40 minutes later than in New York, and you do get light at 10pm in the height of summer.
This was a cool thing about living in Seattle and any further north - in the summer it'd be dusk until 10pm. And the in the winter the sun would basically never appear. I guess it was less "cool" and more "insanity producing" but locals were used to it.
Comparing similar latitudes in north america to where i live in sweden is a wild experience. The average temperatures are double, sometines almost triple, during summer.
On which scale? Because that kinda matters.
Celsius? Kinda hot but not necessarily deadly.
Kelvin? You've turned your city into an air fryer.
They live in Sweden so Celsius
It's still an odd way to compare temperatures:
This is an example I use when I teach data types. It happens because the scale (F or C) is an "interval" scale. Its zero is not based on the absence of the property it is measuring, so you can't apply a multiplicative transform to it like, "double".
It is like lining up by height, calling the shortest person the standard and measure height of everyone else from that. So, the next tallest might be 2 cm, the next 4cm. But clearly the person we are calling 4cm is not twice the height of the person we called 2 cm.
All the immigrants from Southern Italy coming to New York:
"It's the same latitude, it'll be just like home!"
That actually really fucked up the first French attempts to settle the St. Lawrence river. They knew it was a similar latitude as Paris so they were completely unprepared for their first winter in Quebec City.
Why... why is Philadelphia spelled with an "F"?
Virginia Occidentale has a nice ring to it. It''d fuck up John Denver too.
It's translated into French it looks like.
Did you not notice "Virginia Occidental"?
It's Spanish, no? Philadelphia in French is Philadelphie.
my guess is Italian, in Spanish it would have been "occidental"
It is italian
Why would you spell it with a ph?
The US could indeed become the next italy, politically
a once great empire that crumbled
I already knew. My dad lives in southern France and naar him is a sign near the road where the 45th parallel crosses.
That's the border between the states and Canada...
For context this puts Rome about north enough to get snow hurricanes were it on the American east coast
This is related to why the French settled in Quebec iirc. The French king didn't want to send settlers too close to already-established Spanish colonies such as Mexico or Florida, so he ordered that French settlers would settle in the Americas at the same latitude as the métropole, as he thought the climate would be the same.
I thought the boot was supposed to go below the mitten
The west coast city I live in is just a little further north than Philadelphia and has a very Mediterranean climate so this puts that into perspective for me.