This morning, I woke up with the sound of snowplows driving by our house, which to me, is the first hint that it’s time to do some shoveling outside. So, I guess, that’s something I’ll be planning for later.
We’ve been having our share of snow and unpredictable weather this month though: more so than the previous years. Additionally, after every dump of snow, temperatures have gone up way above the zero degrees mark (Celsius). For example, when I was writing this entry a couple of days ago, it was pouring rain outside, which (of course) took care of the snow that was dumped on us earlier last week. So that’s our start of the winter: plenty of snow and then slush that freezes up the next morning. Excellent weather to make glide and slide ramps. Not so much fun for dogs.
It may not surprise you that I frequently visit Weather Canada’s site, but mainly for statistical data, which is available for everybody who is interested in this kind of stuff. Their online Climate Data site is right here and is food for people who love numbers and that. Online weather data can be shown in different formats: for an example, try to click this link for this month’s weather data at the Debert weatherstation. Notice that Debert also keeps track how many centimeters of snow is still on the ground (which is obviously not really scientific, but nonetheless entertaining). If you go back in time on this weblog, you can probably find some similarities between the weather data and my writings.
Weather Canada also provides complete datasets on a CD-ROM, which can be freely downloaded from their site. The software, however, is completely DOS-based and the data is written in some kind of B-Tree-type file format (it’s not even written into their own specific standard file format). Setting it up on your computer can be a pain, but it works good: it comes with tools to export data to CSV, plain text and that silly format I mentioned in the previous sentence. Hopefully, the government will bring this product to more feasonable1 fashionable platforms.
1 I, uh, heh. I thought I wrote feasible.