The weather is nice, right?

The first topic when people hear I'm in Jerusalem is often the weather. Everybody enviously speaks about how warm it must be and how bad the weather in Germany is. Of course this is just some kind of small talk topic but weather is also a connecting topic. For me right now it is just expected that I'm feeling warm most of the time in Jerusalem. Unless it is winter and 10 degrees outside translate to 15 degrees in the apartment. The houses in Jerusalem are not built for colder temperatures. Proper isolation and heating is not really common in this area. So winter time means freezing in front of the computer in double layered clothes.

Temperature comparison between Jerusalem and Berlin

Looking into the data, it is not surprising that the average temperature in Jerusalem is indeed nearly 10 degrees above Berlins average temperature. It's really uncommon to have subzero temperature in Jerusalem. But in Berlin you get every year this freezing cold days or sometimes even weeks (look at 2010). Summer peak temperatures are around 35 degrees in Jerusalem and with that not that much higher then in Berlin. But the warmth is more steady in Jerusalem.

The data shows what everybody expects and is not revealing a lot of unexpected. But looking at a different weather aspect like rain has some surprises.

Data

At the start of this project I thought getting historical weather data should be easy. But while searching for historical data I ran into a lot of pay walls with sometimes quite expensive rates or even total unclear costs. The NOAA National Climatic Data Center provides some free global historical weather data. The data has some small blank spaces and the latest complete year for Berlin and Jerusalem was 2014. To use this data in these visualizations I wrote small python scripts. The used data is accessible for Jerusalem (json) and Berlin(json).