Temperature Preferences
Temperature Preferences
[A chart labeled:] Where to live based on your temperature preferences [In gray, the data source is mentioned below:] Climate data from weatherbase.com
[A chart with two lines with single arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] Y axis bottom: Cold winters X axis right: Hot/humid summers (measured via Humidex, which combines heat and dew point)
[Near each of the corners of the chart there is a gray blob, labeled:] Top left: If you hate cold and heat Top right: If you hate cold and love heat Bottom left: If you love cold and hate heat Bottom right: If you love cold and heat
[The following city names intersect with the top left blob [hate cold and heat] (in reading order):] Mexico City Quito Addis Ababa Bogotá San Francisco Wellington
[The following city names intersect with the top right blob [hate cold and love heat] (in reading order):] Bangkok Ho Chi Minh City Manila Singapore Mumbai Jakarta Dar Es Salaam Honolulu Lagos Rio [de Janeiro] Dhaka Kinhasa Miami Karachi Dubai Cairo Hong Kong Delhi Riyadh Guangzhou Lahore Sabha Houston Needles El Paso Baghdad Dallas
[The following city names intersect with the bottom left blob [love cold and hate heat] (in reading order):] Reykjavik (with arrow pointing left) Berlin Stockholm Oslo Calgary Halifax Daqaidam Kiev Casper Yumen St Petersburg Volgograd Moscow Ottawa Vladivostok Thunder Bay Duluth Urumqi Altay Regina Irkutsk Abakan Ulaanbaatar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom right blob) Fairbanks McMurdo (with arrow pointing down-left) Yellowknife (with arrow pointing down) Hailar
[The following city names intersect with the bottom right blob [love cold and heat] (in reading order):] [Washington] DC Shanghai Tehran Saint Louis New York Xi'An Salt Lake City Kansas City Beijing Seoul Sapporo Pyongyang Sioux Falls Turpan Jinzhou Minneapolis Shenyang Fargo Tongliao Qiqihar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom left blob)
[The following city names do not intersect with any blob (in reading order):] Nairobi São Paulo Brisbane Los Angeles Perth Cape Town Sydney Athens Santiago Barcelona Melbourne Rome Buenos Aires Jerusalem Atlanta Raleigh Madrid Chengdu Tokyo Dublin Portland Richmond London Istanbul Edinburgh Vancouver Paris Flagstaff Santa Fe Tashkent Wuhan Geneva Lubbock Boston Budapest Kabul Toronto Omaha

This is a chart of major (and not-so-major) populated areas showing seasonal temperature patterns. The chart is a guide to where one might like to live depending on how much summer heat and winter cold they enjoy. There are four focused zones:
The summer heat axis is determined by humidex , a system that combines heat and humidity to generate an estimate of perceived "summer discomfort".
Note that if the values from this table are charted, the result is similar but not exact to how Randall drew the comic.  For instance, he shows Kinshasa as having a “colder” winter than Honolulu, but the average low in the coldest month for Kinshasa (20°C) is hotter than the average low in Honolulu (18.9°C).  In general these differences are minor, but a few stand out:
It is not certain if these differences are a due to errors, the use of a different data set, or deliberate “Easter Eggs” set to see if anyone would notice.
According to Randall:
However, given the great variability of weather patterns across the globe, it's not altogether clear how useful this would actually be to someone looking to choose where to live, since it's not clear exactly what "love/hate hot/cold" would mean.  It's also not clear that the relationship between temperature and discomfort is linear. More likely is that there is a small temperature band where each degree of change causes significantly more discomfort, and beyond which it's just "too hot/cold".
Hottest and coldest month therefore may not be the best measure.  For example, is one or two very cold days better or worse than a month's worth of moderately cold days?  Shown in the table below for each place are the number of days above 32°C (90°F) and the number of days below 0°C (32°F), taken from Weatherbase.com (Randall's source).  For most people a temperature above 32°C is considered hot and a temperature below 0°C is considered cold.  So, for instance, someone who loves heat might want to live in Tehran (with three months above 32°C) rather than Beijing (with only one month) even though the peak month Humidex in Beijing is higher.  Someone who loves cold might want to live in Santa Fe, where it never gets particularly cold (only -8°C) but where it is below freezing almost half of the year (179.8 days on average).  In general though, the places with the most hot or cold days also have the hottest and coldest extremes.
Once again, Turpan stands out for its misery, with days above 32°C totaling four months and days below 0°C totaling four months.  In fact, on average there is at least one day every month of the year that the temperature is either above 32°C or below 0°C.  This includes almost every day in June, July and August being hot and every single day in December, January and February being below freezing.
Some of the most extreme climates on earth are not shown on this comic, however, perhaps because some of them are uninhabited. Eismitte (a camp established in the center of Greenland in the 1930s) and Vostok Station (in the center of Antarctica) both see temperatures far colder than McMurdo, although being in the middle of ice caps neither can be inhabited without outside support.  The areas around Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk in eastern Siberia also see temperatures colder than McMurdo and are actual towns, although summer temperatures are much higher.  In both places the summer weather is generally average (Humidex of 22°C to 23°C) but they have seen record highs of 34°C  to 37°C  and record lows of almost -68°C, giving them the greatest temperature swings on earth. Bouvet Island is a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean, near the latitude where there are no land masses to interrupt storms and currents (south of South America but north of Antarctica).  As a result it has one of the most consistent climates on earth, with a high and low almost always within a few degrees of 0°C all year long – a perpetual state of almost to just freezing, combined with clouds, fog, wind and rain from ocean storms. Death Valley in California, Shahdad in Iran, and Murzuk in Libya all vie for having the highest temperature in the world, although not the highest Humidex.
The relevant temperature data for these extreme locations, where known, is in the second table for comparison.
The title text refers to a quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain ; however, as it points out, the quote is misattributed , and it is unknown who created it. The text then goes on to claim that the person who originally said the quote never visited McMurdo Station , a US Antarctic research center, which is certainly a colder place than San Francisco.
The comic as originally published had a "smudge" or scattering of gray pixels, visible in the center of the image between the labels for Madrid and Lubbock. A new version of the image was later uploaded with this removed.
By editing the image to increase the contrast between the background and the "smudge", as shown here, it is possible to see dots and grid lines. This would seem to be a scatter graph, likely one showing temperature data used by Randall as a reference while making this comic, and accidentally left visible when the comic was first uploaded. A similar thing happened in 1561: Water Phase Diagram , where a phase diagram from Wikipedia was faintly visible in the original version of the comic .
[A chart labeled:] Where to live based on your temperature preferences [In gray, the data source is mentioned below:] Climate data from weatherbase.com
[A chart with two lines with single arrows. Each arrow is labeled:] Y axis bottom: Cold winters X axis right: Hot/humid summers (measured via Humidex, which combines heat and dew point)
[Near each of the corners of the chart there is a gray blob, labeled:] Top left: If you hate cold and heat Top right: If you hate cold and love heat Bottom left: If you love cold and hate heat Bottom right: If you love cold and heat
[The following city names intersect with the top left blob [hate cold and heat] (in reading order):] Mexico City Quito Addis Ababa Bogotá San Francisco Wellington
[The following city names intersect with the top right blob [hate cold and love heat] (in reading order):] Bangkok Ho Chi Minh City Manila Singapore Mumbai Jakarta Dar Es Salaam Honolulu Lagos Rio [de Janeiro] Dhaka Kinhasa Miami Karachi Dubai Cairo Hong Kong Delhi Riyadh Guangzhou Lahore Sabha Houston Needles El Paso Baghdad Dallas
[The following city names intersect with the bottom left blob [love cold and hate heat] (in reading order):] Reykjavik (with arrow pointing left) Berlin Stockholm Oslo Calgary Halifax Daqaidam Kiev Casper Yumen St Petersburg Volgograd Moscow Ottawa Vladivostok Thunder Bay Duluth Urumqi Altay Regina Irkutsk Abakan Ulaanbaatar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom right blob) Fairbanks McMurdo (with arrow pointing down-left) Yellowknife (with arrow pointing down) Hailar
[The following city names intersect with the bottom right blob [love cold and heat] (in reading order):] [Washington] DC Shanghai Tehran Saint Louis New York Xi'An Salt Lake City Kansas City Beijing Seoul Sapporo Pyongyang Sioux Falls Turpan Jinzhou Minneapolis Shenyang Fargo Tongliao Qiqihar Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom left blob)
[The following city names do not intersect with any blob (in reading order):] Nairobi São Paulo Brisbane Los Angeles Perth Cape Town Sydney Athens Santiago Barcelona Melbourne Rome Buenos Aires Jerusalem Atlanta Raleigh Madrid Chengdu Tokyo Dublin Portland Richmond London Istanbul Edinburgh Vancouver Paris Flagstaff Santa Fe Tashkent Wuhan Geneva Lubbock Boston Budapest Kabul Toronto Omaha
