We were thinking that the last couple of months have been colder than last year.  Fortunately, we have our wonderful Shipmate stove burning offcuts from our 2007/8 planking project.  But is it really colder?  I decided to find out.  Here is the daily data from the SQL airport which is about 1 mile away.

I have plotted the daily mean temperature reported at SQL and shaded the area between the two lines red if 2012 was warmer or blue if 2012 was colder than 2011.  As we can see from the large patches of red, this past Summer was indeed warmer than the previous year.  We knew it felt warm, but since we hadn’t been around during the Summer of 2011, we couldn’t compare.  Starting in November, however, this year has been much colder as can be seen by the blue shading.  But what about daily high temperatures.?

This plot shows the difference in the daily high temperatures.  The yellow-reds are where 2012 was warmer and the blue-greens are where 2012 was colder.  The line plot has the monthly high temperatures.  As we can see, the data looks pretty balanced between higher and lower.  So what about the temperature lows?

In this plot, we can see that the summer temperature lows were warmer than in 2011.  The monthly lows during the summer were a little warmer, but over the past two months, the monthly low hasn’t been much different from 2011.  So, although the monthly low is similar, over the past couple of months, we are having day after day of those lows.  That can be seen in all the daily counts that are blue since November.  That explains why it feels colder this year.

We can see that this past spring had lower lows, but higher mean temperatures than in 2011.  Again, we weren’t here in 2011 and will soon be leaving the mild climate of Redwood City.  So we probably won’t get to experience a second Spring here.  It will be fun to learn more about other places in the SFBay as well as elsewhere along the Pacific coast.