Cold House Journal

I’d been feeling that we are a little wussy this year, compared to last, since last year we stopped having fires on March 7th, while this year we haven’t yet declared fire-season over.  (Though, in our defense, I don’t think we’ve had a fire in three or four days… have lost track.)

Anyway, astute and gentle reader J.W. suggested that possibly it wasn’t just a matter of wussiness– possibly it has actually been colder this March than last.  It didn’t take long to confirm that this hypothesis is true.  In fact, for the period of March 7 – 29, it was (on average) 5.5ºF warmer last year than this year!  That’s a lot, in our house.  An indoor difference between 49.5º and 55º can definitely be the difference between fire and no fire.

Here, too, is a visual representation of the outdoor temps.  The faint lines are actual daily averages– the heavy lines are 3-day moving averages of those, to smooth it out a little.  You can see how much colder it’s been this year…

This entry was posted on March 30, 2011 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Hard data, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.