F'ing Brrrr!

For those of you in Boston who went through this January thinking, "Man, this feels like a really cold winter..."--well, yep, it was. For work (and for my own geekery), I keep track of Heating Degree Days and Cooling Degree Days published by NOAA. HDD and CDD are metrics that let you know how cold/hot a month/week/year was; to get heating degree days base 65 (HDD Base 65), you take the daily average temperature, and if below 65 F, find the difference, and sum them over the week/month/year you're interested in.

So the plot below shows the gas consumption per month (in therms), along with the monthly HDD. Youch! 1240 HDD for January!


This isn't to say that this is rare for Boston--I see months over 1200 HDD in 2003 and 2004.

And for reference, for my dear K-W friends, January had 1606 HDD Base 65. Oh yeah.

Now, I assume that my Bay Area friends will take this as an opportunity to gloat--I believe they were commenting about 70 F weather outside a few days ago. Well, here's another reason to gloat--a graphic from a neat New York Times column ("Revenge of the Rust Belt"). It talks about how rust belt towns now hemmorhage population, while there is plenty of growth in places like Phoenix. The economist who wrote the column points out that rust belt cities were founded near natural resources (coal/coke/iron ore), and costs of transportation were very high when the towns were founded. In contrast, people are now moving to Sun Belt cities, now that transportation is cheaper (and I will add, that air conditioning and irrigation makes life possible in those moon-like landscapes). But in terms of population swings:

There is no variable that predicts urban population growth in the 20th century better than January temperature. The figure below illustrates the connection between metropolitan area population growth from 1980 to 2000 and the January temperature. While 19th-century cities formed in places where companies had a productive edge, generally because of access to water ways or coal mines, 20th-century cities formed in pleasant places where people wanted to live.



Yeah, so gloat away, Bay Area folks. Up here in the Northeast, we've got... um... character building, right?

I like shoveling snow! Shovel shovel shovel. Sigh.