28
BAMOS
Dec 2018
Article
An urban-centric view of the weather:
which Australian cities have the most
‘nice’ days?
David Martin
Bureau of Meteorology
Email: [email protected]
1. Introduction
While farmers might get excited about a day of consistent rain,
for most people living in Australia’s major cities, that same rain
is often considered a nuisance, as a majority of activities and
day-to-day decisions in urban areas are less complicated when
it’s not too cold, hot, windy, humid, cloudy or wet. Although the
Bureau of Meteorology doesn’t use subjective language such as
‘nice’ in its weather forecasts, and stopped using ‘fine’ in 2015, it
is language that’s commonly used during casual conversation,
and by media and social media commentators. A day with the
sun shining and temperatures that aren’t too hot or too cold will
often be referred to as ‘nice’ or ‘fine’.
This analysis presents an urban-centric view of ‘nice’ weather.
2. Method
Following criteria used by the Capital Weather Gang in its Nice
Day Sun forecasts and by Brian Brettschneider in an article
published in The Washington Post, this analysis combined
a variety of weather elements for Australian stations. The
assumption is that people living in urban areas prefer days with
warm temperatures, low humidity, no rain, light winds, and at
least some blue sky. Closely related to ‘nice’ days are the thermal
comfort observations reported by the Bureau of Meteorology
for locations around the country, which include both the
ambient temperature and wet bulb globe temperature.
The specific criteria used were:
The list of sites considered was generally those in or close to
cities with a population of at least 100,000 people (as reported
by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in their report Regional
Population Growth, Australia, 2016–17). Some additional
smaller population centres (Esperance, Ceduna, and Broome,
for example) were included to increase the spatial distribution
of the analysis. The included cities are representative of about
80% of Australia’s total population, so capturing those places
where most Australians live.
3. Results for urban areas
The winning city, with an average of 105 ‘nice’ days per year, was
Brisbane (Table 1 and Figures 1 and 2).
At the other end of the scale, Darwin averages only three ‘nice’
days per year because of its consistently high temperatures
and high humidity, particularly in the wet season. Of course,
some might argue that the hotter days in Darwin (often with
humidity) make for ideal swimming conditions, but these
City State/Territory Annual average
Brisbane QLD 105
Alice Springs NT 81
Mildura VIC 81
Toowoomba QLD 69
Perth WA 69
Bundaberg QLD 67
• Maximum daily temperature between 18 °C and 29 °C Sydney NSW 62
• Maximum daily dew point <= 18 °C Adelaide SA 61
• Maximum daily wind gust < 11.11 m/s (40 km/h) Ceduna SA 60
• Average daily cloud cover <= 6 Oktas • Daily rainfall < 0.2 mm Townsville QLD 58
Newcastle NSW 55
Canberra ACT 53
Melbourne VIC 41
Esperance WA 41
Hobart TAS 38
Cairns QLD 37
Mount Gambier SA 34
Launceston TAS 33
Broome WA 13
Darwin NT 3
Raw, unhomogenised data was used, generally from long-term
individual sites to maximise the number of places that could be
examined. Where possible, sites with data since at least 1970
were selected, however there were some sites included that
had a few years less data where no nearby long-term site was
available, plus a couple of composite locations consisting of data
from two historical sites. A change to AWS wind measurements
in the early 1990s created a discontinuity in wind measurements
across Australia (see Jakob 2010), however, the assumption here
is that the change in instrumentation affected all sites equally,
so that a comparison between cities remains valid across those
years.
Table 1: Annual average count of ‘nice’ days for each city
(based on data from 1970–2017).