Chris Nelson wears his ardor wrapped snugly around his neck. The Edmonton-based blogger is a self-defined weather nerd and has the headband to show it. Like his blog, Edmonton Weather Nerdery, Nelson’s “chart headband” tracks Edmonton’s ancient weather statistics over a century. The headband is a series of brightly colored strains of blue, pink, and purple crocheted collectively. Each line represents 12 months of climate courting lower back to 1880.
A fellow bicycle owner and knitting enthusiast made it using a hand as a gift to Nelson. “The headband is just based off Environment Canada’s weather information from the Blatchford Station going lower back to 1880,” Nelson said in an interview Friday with CBC Radio’s Edmonton AM. A mechanical engineer by day, Nelson has doggedly tracked Edmonton’s everyday temperatures for three years. Using raw statistics available through Environment Canada, he analyses weekly, monthly, and seasonal developments.
His blog is a maze of line charts and bar graphs of daily lows, highs, and file-placing seasons. “I look at primary questions, like how cold and hot it has been. How regularly do we get genuinely bloodless days? “Last February turned into the 5th coldest February we’ve had for the reason that 1880. It seems at minutiae like that.”
‘No expert.’
Nelson’s obsession with weather information began in the winter of 2015. By then, he had been commuting on foot or cycling seven kilometers to work every day for more than a decade.
And as he persevered through the factors — frequently together with his cold-hating dog in tow — he started to wonder what might be considered a “common” Edmonton winter day.
He assumed the winters were getting milder; however, become that true? Were things so much worse when he became a child? Was his reminiscence of these brutal, bloodless winters within the Nineteen Eighties accurate?
Nelson said the metropolis has lots of cold weather, but there are fewer days every 12 months.
“I’m honestly no longer an expert. I’m just playing around with 130-odd years of weather statistics,” he said. “If you don’t like charts at all, it’s now not going to make lots feel to you. But they are lively, and I try to offer some context, and hopefully, one in all of them will communicate to you.”
