It is now the middle of winter in Australia. To the amusement and sometimes jealousy of my online friends in other countries, ‘the middle of winter’ in Sydney sees average low temperatures of 8 degrees and average highs of 16. Centigrade. My suburb, located 60 kilometres from the cost, gets colder lows and warmer highs. The record low is -1.4 degrees.
Part of difficulty is that many people conceptualise Australia, the USA and the British Isles as being geographically equivalent, but they’re not. Sydney lies at 33 degrees south latitude, along with Capetown, South Africa and Santiago, Chile. At 33 degrees north lie Casablanca, Morocco; Beirut, Lebanon; Baghdad, Iraq; Islamabad, Pakistan; Fukuoka, Japan; and Atlanta, USA (OK, so there’s the USA, but the southern part of it). (On the other hand, the UK and the ‘lower 48’ (indeed 49) of the USA do not overlap at all – Lizard Point, Cornwall lies very slightly north of the main US/Canada border.)
One of my online friends lives near Toronto, Canada, which conveniently lies at 43 degrees north, along with Monaco; Florence, Italy; Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina; Sochi, Russia; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Ürümqi, China; Vladivostok, Russia; and Sapporo, Japan. At 43 degrees south lie the southernmost point of Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand.
Other online friends live in the British Isles, and it is convenient to take Dublin, Ireland and Manchester, England, which lie at 53 degrees north, along with Hamburg, Germany; Minsk, Belarus; and Edmonton, Canada. (Irkutsk, Russia is less than one degree away.) At 53 degrees south lies Punta Arenas, Chile.
At 63 degrees north lies Trondheim, Norway. At 63 degrees south lies the northernmost point of Antarctica. McMurdo Station and Scott Base lie at 77 degrees south. At or above 77 degrees north lie six permanent settlements in Greenland, Svalbard and Nunavut.
Clearly, latitude and seasons are only two factors influencing climate and weather. It sometimes snows in parts of Australia in December!
On the other hand, I was sorting through some old files just then and found this:
(PS My big resource in writing this post is this Wikipedia page of cities listed by latitude.)
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 
What an interesting article, David!
At 35.55 N, and directly on the Pacific coast, my home sees temperate temperatures all year long.
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You share a latitude with Nicosia, Tehran and Tokyo, and are the equivalent of Canberra (which had a low of -4 last night).
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brrrrrrr
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Did you see my announcement on Facebook that I’m moving back to Korea next month? My city there is very close to the same latitude as you, but has a very different climate.
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Yes, I did. I think I commented (but maybe not). What is the climate there? My understanding, possibly very wrong, is that longitude and altitude also affect climate, as well as such situations such as distance from an ocean. I really don’t know much about the subject, although I admit it is fascinating.
Which city will you be living in? I’m looking forward to seeing more photos of the city, it’s buildings, inhabitants, trees, flowers, and plants. You manage to tell wonderful stories of your environment with your photos.
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