A climate calendar has many uses.For example, it can help assess weather patterns in the area you live and enable you to make best use of your heating and cooling systems. Industry, and in particular the farming community, can make best use of the weather once its pattern is determined. Obviously, some countries have a more diverse climate and unpredictable weather patterns. However, looking at data collected over a long period of time will show a general pattern.
These days, such a climate calendar can be easily made on-line. The facility is free to use and is really quite simple. The Midwestern Climate Center Climate Calendar offers this for nine American States. These are: Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin.
Creation of your calendar is as simple as clicking on the calendar image, selecting your state, a weather station and a time period. This will give you a set of results from 1971 to the year 2000.
For those of us who live in other parts of the world making a climate calendar still requires research. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Contact your local weather station or centre as a good starting point. After discussion, it may be possible for them to email you the relevant information. Search online for suitable RSS feeds that will supply the information directly to your desktop on a daily basis.
The basic calendar layout will be easy to create using Word or a similar software programme. Start by using a very basic, simple layout, as you can always amend this at a later date.
Decide on the time period’s figures that you want to use. If you want to assess what the weather is generally like in say July, you will probably need at least twenty years’ worth of information.
Perhaps you want to start a weather calendar from today in order to keep track of weather and climate changes. If so, check online for daily updates. An RSS feed to your local weather centre will hopefully supply all the information you need.
In Conclusion
Even if you do not live in the Midwestern states, it may be worth clicking on this article’s link to the Midwestern Climate Centre Climate Calendar and creating a fictitious climate calendar in order to use it as a working example. This will help you undertsnad the information that you need and the best way to display it.
Writing this article has inspired me to start a local climate calendar for where I live in the UK. With the changing weather patterns and climate in the UK, it will be interesting to see just what these records show.a few months or years down the line.
