Quote:
Originally Posted by Wentworth
Same goes for Calgary. When I moved from Vancouver to Calgary I was expecting the city to be dry and brown in the summer, even ex-Calgarians told me as much. I had been surprised that it seemed to be green and lush here every year since I moved here, whereas Vancouver and Victoria seem to have had droughts every summer so far. Now I know I'm not just imagining it.
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Well, the brownness of Calgary is rather exaggerated, especially by locals. This year everything is still green as all hell. What people are really talking about is the yellowing and eventual browning of the surrounding grasslands, which is already happening in early August. We see much more of this in the city proper than other places, because of the lack of tree cover in much of the city. It's exacerbated by the fact that so much of Calgary is brand-spanking-new, so there hasn't been time for trees to grow on much of this. I'm thinking things like boulevards and the banks around major roads/interchanges, that sort of thing.
Now, by September things are already going brown and by late September, I've never seen it very "green" here. But that's no different than any other city in this climate. Trees drop their leaves in the fall and grass starts to die. It just seems more noticeable in Calgary. It may also be due to the fact that you have a lot further "view" here due to all the hills. It's possible to see huge chunks of Calgary from just about every corner of the city, so you're exposed to so much more brown at a time than you would be somewhere else.
But yeah, we're definitely nowhere near as dry as is made out. Look at those precipitation graphs - Calgary gets steady rain all summer long. It's just that spring can sometimes take FOREVER to get here, and fall seems to come earlier, so the green season is shorter than most of Canada.
Oh, and on Vancouver - I've never found it anywhere near as rainy as people claim, but it sure is cloudy in the winter. And when it rains, it's this near-constant drizzly shit. So while overall precipitation may not be THAT high, it still feels like it's always raining. Contrast that to a prairie city (or Montreal, or Toronto) where much of the precipitation falls in massive, short-lived storms. Calgary gets almost all of its monthly precipitation in 2 or 3 big dumps, as opposed to spread out throughout 27 days like Vancouver seems to be.
Yes, this is a hint for someone to work up some "daily sunshine hours" graphs.
