Looking for the best climate for me starts by getting away from the cold. While Amsterdam clearly has a warmer climate than anywhere in Finland, I went to Weather Underground to find out how much warmer it is, and to compare with the cities on my shortlist of places to settle in.
The dataset I used was from 1 January 2001 to 1 January 2010 (sample). This was an easy dataset to work with as it is available in .csv format, and contains detailed daily data.
Unfortunately it doesn’t have Malta or Panama, so I will have to assess those separetely. I left Brazil assessment to a later date as I haven’t looked at which city would be most suitable candidate, yet.
The first metric I’m looking at is how cold it gets. I’m not overly concerned about outliers or degree of coldness. To build my Climate Ranking I started with the number of days each city has its minimum temperature lower than 5 degrees Centigrade, and maximum temperature below 15. This captures those days where the nights are frigid, and there isn’t even a reasonable daytime temperature to compensate for it.
Below results. It shows six cities on my shortlist, ranked by the number of cold days in a year in the past nine or so years.
| # of days with min temp below 5, max below 15 |
| City | Days per year | Ranking |
| Hong Kong | 9 | 1 |
| Montpellier | 104 | 2 |
| Madrid | 146 | 3 |
| Paris | 162 | 4 |
| Amsterdam | 184 | 5 |
| Helsinki | 245 | 6 |
Hong Kong is the clear winner with just over a week’s worth of cold days in a year. I was surprised to find that Madrid has almost five months of cold by this criteria. Then again, that’s little compared to Helsinki with two thirds of the year in miserable cold.
In the following posts I will compare Heat Index, inclement weather and Perfect Days, and finally put it all together in the final Climate Index.
l love Helsinki even in the cold!