More weather geekery

As I think I mentioned earlier, I'm a bit of a weather geek. During one of my stretches of unemployment, I obtained a copy of Environment Canada's weather records CD-ROM, and created a PHP/MySQL interface to the Toronto weather data. This means I can look up weather records and stuff. (I repeat: I am a geek.)

Today, as I write this, it is -22C at Toronto Pearson Airport. According to the records, which go back to 1937, this is the second-coldest March 6th in history. The all-time champ is March 6, 1948, when the temperature dropped to -27.8C. There must have been a weather front going through: the high that day was -1.1C.

I also want to give a shout-out to March 6, 1944: the low temperature that day was -21.1C, and the high was 3.3C. And there was 8.1 mm of rain. People going to work would have needed three layers of sweaters and an umbrella. Fortunately, the cold snap came before the rain: on March 5, the low was -21.7C. March 7 was normal. If it had been the other way around, the entire city would have turned into one giant skating rink.

While I'm playing with my weather records program, here's a couple more weird weather facts for March (these are all from downtown Toronto):

• Most rain on a March day: 43.7 mm on March 19, 1881. That's more than an inch and a half of rain!
• Most snow in March: 40.6 cm on March 27, 1870.
• Warmest day in March: 26.7C on March 28, 1946.
• Warmest day in the first ten days of March: 21.3C on March 9, 2000.

I remember that last day very well - it was great, but it seemed very weird, as if something had gone wrong and we were due to pay for it. And we did: according to the records, two days later there was 10 cm of snow. I can hear the winter gods laughing from here.