Chasing Summers

Note

This post does not consist of any formal research effort and is more of a fun exploration of a random topic.

After living through Melbourne’s winter, I now have a greater appreciation of the sun. This lead me thinking. I love living in the sun, which means that ideally I would live in two cities: one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south. I could then live an endless summer by switching cities whenever winter loomed. But here is the question, what two cities would I select?

To narrow down my search, I limited my selection to the top 10 most livable cities as chosen by the EIU.[1] These consist of the following:

• Vienna

• Copenhagen

• Zurich

• Melbourne

• Calgary

• Geneva

• Sydney

• Vancouver

• Osaka

• Auckland

After being traumatised by Melbourne’s perpetual winters, the next questions became obvious: how warm and sunny are these cities?

Monthly temperature of different cities

Let’s first start with temperature. I found online that the ideal temperature for humans to live in is between 20°C and 25°C, otherwise known by its fancy term: the ‘thermalneutral’ zone.[2]

Because of my summer bias, however, I opted to extend this ‘optimal’ range all the way to 30°C.

Below I then graphed out the monthly temperatures of our candidate cities, with our warm 20°C to 30°C goldilocks zone highlighted in green.