Hello and welcome to WeatherBout

Hello and welcome to WeatherBout!

The purpose of this blog is to highlight weather observations that have occurred in Australia and Finland. I'm an Australian currently living in Sydney, who has also lived in Finland for 5½ years, and I have been fascinated by weather and meteorology for the last 7 or 8 years. In 2009 I decided to start taking my own recordings. While I don't have any actual weather recording equipment myself (maybe in the future!), I access and monitor the publically available official records taken by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology and the Finnish Meteorological Institute to compare daily minimum and maximum temperatures between Sydney, Australia and Jyväskylä, Finland.

Obviously Australia and Finland have extremely different experiences when it comes to weather observations. While Australia is well known to be a rather warm country, it actually experiences a wide range of temperatures and there are various climatic conditions in different locations throughout the year. Finland, in comparison, shares a similar climate throughout most of the country and has those four distinct seasons we all know.

So why Sydney and Jyväskylä? How many people even know the city of Jyväskylä? We'll cover that later... but anyway, I grew up in Sydney, so that's easy enough. As for Jyväskylä, that story is slightly longer. To make it brief, I moved to Finland in 2007 and had the pleasure of studying in Jyväskylä and living there for 5yrs. And well, Sydney and Jyväskylä are totally different places, and I figured nobody else has probably ever compared the two, not only in general, but also in terms of weather observations.

So what will be on this blog? Well, I hope to able to share some interesting observations, not only for Sydney and Jyväskylä (although these two cities are the focus), but also for other locations in Australia and Finland. You can expect to see things like weather records, discussion about unusual weather events such as storms, cyclones and other weather related natural disasters, discussion about the recordings I've taken since 2009, and even smaller events like the first snow in Finland in Autumn (or even Summer as it has been known to occur) or that first day above 35C in Sydney after Winter. And because we all know pictures tell so much more than words, you'll find some weather related images as well. I'm sure as time progresses, I'll be able to go more in-depth in to the climates of both cities, and perhaps there'll be something to learn.

If anyone has absolutely any questions about my recordings, my interest in meteorology, or pretty much anything you have on your mind, just go ahead and send me a message. If you don't have any questions but you'd like to contribute some images or suggest something, I'm always open to that as well.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you stick around!