How has moving to a new climate affected your preferences?

Yeah April-June, maybe into early July, is the thunderstorm season there. Past that you'd be lucky to see much.

I've moved so much in my life and been to many places so I can appreciate a 27C day with a 22C dew and rain or -25C and clear skies.

Living where I do, has made me appreciate sunshine more than anything though. Second to that, an adequate amount of rain is fine but past that I will start to be annoyed.

Just passed 5 years in in Renmark.

Basically, I still love heat, infact, I want more heat now than I did when in Melbourne. But, I now actually enjoy frost, as here the winter mornings are often crisp, which is far, far better than the cold damp coronavirus breeding slop in Melbourne. A clear crisp frosty morning often leads to a nice sunny warm winter day. That was the main revelation for me. I actually enjoy winters now, while I hated them in Melbourne.  My tolerance for cold overcast has greatly decreased, any more than 2 cold overcast days in a row and I start to get agitated. But on the other hand, because they are not universal like in Melbourne, the odd overcast drizzly day is almost a novelty now.

My burning desire for hot summers and hatred for southerlies in the warm season has actually increased, as this is supposed to be a warm summer climate unlike southern Victoria.

I stil desire storms more than ever, and I feel my desire for storms has overtaken my temperature preferences. I'd also like a bit more rain, specially heavy downpours - while before in Melbourne  I was sick to death of the wet.

Moving to Tucson just confirmed to me how much I desire colder weather. When I was in Miami I thought it was possible that if I actually lived somewhere where I had to bundle up every morning for months I might get tired of it but in reality the coldest days of winter were easily the best in Tucson. Speaking of Tucson specifically the large diurnal ranges in the winter were mildly annoying. A 35F morning followed by a 65F day means you need to either resign yourself to being uncomfortable for part of the day or carry around extra clothing. Tucson also helped me realize how much cold rain sucks and led to alterations in my dream climate to colder, drier, and snowier winters.

Moving to Northern VA two winters ago just reinforced the fact that I love cold/snowy winters, as I found the winters there far too mild despite being much colder than where I came from. But moving up there did help me realize that I don't need strong thunderstorms 25-28 days a month during summer to be satisfied, I'm OK with sunny and dry periods during summer as long as it's not the dominating feature of the climate.

I moved from Christchurch NZ to Bangkok and have been living here for over three years now. I still like the same kinds of climates as before (hot and sunny with a decent amount of storm activity) and I think I have more of a tolerance of heat and humidity now (especially hot nights with 25+ C lows) but I've come to appreciate some aspects of temperate / mid-latitudinal climates.

For one thing, the lack of variation here (diurnal, seasonal and day-to-day) grates on me a bit. Here we can have lows of 24-26 C and highs of 31-33 C for weeks on end. But Christchurch could have one summer day with a 33 C high that quickly changed to 15 C with a Sou'westerly change (which I hated, but at least it made the weather more dynamic). Plus, diurnal ranges often exceeded 20 C (say, a -3 C low followed by an 18 C high) when they're rarely more than 10 C here. Those clear, frosty mornings that quickly warmed up to the mid-high teens are something I miss, even if it isn't my favourite weather in terms of comfort.

Plus, the general lack of wind here feels kinda strange. Christchurch could have some really strong SW / NW gusts and the weather could have a completely different feel depending on where the wind was coming from: NW = warm and dry (possibly cloudy), E = cool and breezy, SW = cold and rainy. Here we rarely have gusts over 20 kph unless it's just about to rain.

So, I guess my preferences are more or less the same (BKK was never my favourite climate to begin with, being a bit on the hot side for my tastes) but I have gained an appreciation for the unique qualities of temperate climates vs. tropical ones.

Before I lived in NM, I had a fascination with desert/semi-arid climates and places with high diurnal ranges, mostly due to the novelty factor after living in humid climates all my life. After living there for several years, I realized how important regular rainfall and moderate temps were to me. My opinion of mountain Western climates is now a lot lower due to their tendency to go long periods without rain.

Otherwise, my preferences have remained relatively constant throughout my life. Even as a kid, I envisioned myself liking a climate with moderate summers and mild winters. I do think that living in a variety of climates makes your weather preferences more accurate, though. I believe people that live in climates on one extreme (very hot or very cold) tend to overcompensate by exaggerating their weather preference of the opposite extreme. Just go somewhere in the middle and readjust your preferences from there.

My preferences haven't budged an inch. Sure my stay in Nice has stressed the utmost importance of day-to-day variability, but it's not like I wasn't aware of this preference of mine before. Also I don't see large rain totals such as 500 mm+ months and 100 mm+ storms in the same way. They're just a lot of fun provided the local geography allows for good water drainage so my dream climate would probably be more prone to them now.

Stuttgart and Lyon OTOH couldn't alter my preferences in any meaningful way as they're basically enhanced variations of my current climate.



Really? I thought he still despised oceanic climates after coming back from Paris, but that was long ago.

Ah yes I remember now!

Going back and forth from VA to SC, I've changed my preferences over time, for over a year now. My dream climate used to align with VA's climates, probably comparable to Wise, Monterey, and Pearisburg as the most comparable examples, as my home climate would have warm Septembers than I would like it to be, like 77-79°F instead of 70-73°F for average highs. For someone who didn't know that much about climates back in 2020, I thought that VA's climate was 5°F colder than it really is, sort of like PA. This is what eventually formatted my original dream climate, to be a proactively 4-season climate with differences, much more continental than today's dream climate.


I used to think that winter lows in the mid 20's were necessary to create a "true winter vibe", as that was the average winter lows for almost all of VA. However, as I have done more research from the outside world in SC as well as looking at climate data, I started to conceptualize the true definition of winter, which came out to be just needing average lows in the 30's or even 40's for December, January, and February. In Myrtle Beach, the average winter lows are comparable to Central England, but having 10°F warmer average highs, which confused me at first. I thought this was a distinctive area from home, cause now I can actually get a chance to grow crops in the winter without protections. 


This made me feel like the winters were "mild" or something, despite it being very distinctive still, albeit average lows being colder than half of England too. However, due to England's average winter highs as well as longer winters, it shows a major contrast between England and SC. Thing is, this was a new concept to me, which made me ignorant of the reality of Myrtle Beach's climate, which is actually just a mixture of temperate and subtropical, especially when half the state looks nothing more than a standard 'warm' temperate location. 


As I joined CityData in June 2021, it was getting close to changing my preferences I think, but not exactly. Even as I was getting adjusted to the new climate, I still looked back at VA's climate cause it was a lot more varied than Myrtle Beach is, even though the reality starts to show of the deeply temperate looks that it can give off sometimes. However, I will go as far as to say that average lows in the 40's for DJF is not "warm" but literally chilly. That would also mean that Houston and North FL are fairly continental too, at least to part of their genetics, cause it would be around 60's°F during their days, which is automatically spring weather for most of the US. This means that most of the US is basically levels of temperate, especially for the legacy oak forests of the Piedmont Southeast. One would see a lot of legacy oak forests all over the place, making a place like Atlanta feel like DC, and Greenville like Lynchburg. 


For more of later 2021 and 2022, I've also acclimated to more of that warmer weather, but not by much actually. I'm not sure if my heat tolerance has changed, but I've noticed less usage of AC and fans when it's upper 70's to 80's though. 90°F and all that is still too hot for me to ever feel comfortable, especially with humidity, purely unlivable, as well as anything above 85°F. 80-82°F isn't too bad but not the best either. I'm not so sure if I will ever acclimatize to the heat, since Myrtle Beach is a four-season temperate climate after all. Also, I am thinking about getting a place back in VA but it would be a smaller place, so I can be back home without as much of the swampy heat. However, the winter lows in SC are nicer considering that VA doesn't really snow much except for some times(January 2022). However, I have realized that highs in the 50's°F during the dead of winter doesn't mean it's like warm or anything, it's just a milder variant of winter. I would say once temperatures get into the 60's°F that it starts to become less and less distinctive, despite of the continental lows. I can now acknowledge that a place like Louisiana and FL would simply be too hot for me, but short term visits wouldn't be too bad, as I can visit my relatives in Pensacola and see their garden.


In summary, the dream climate that I posted in February 2022 was basically the newer version of my 2020 climate, which would be more comparable to Wise, VA or something as such, or just about any Virginian climate, since I would rather be there than here in SC for a long period of time. However, SC's climate has many advantages and people take it too far for granted and assume everything works, because they would never know what to do with the climate besides sunbathing and swimming, and not also more practical uses like gardening and better habitation for humanity overall. However, that just comes to be cause I ended up being in a beach town, but at least the nights are not freezing almost every night, but rather here and there. That's why beach towns would be useful, not just lazy sunbathing and swimming like you can't have a real purpose in life or something. Things like mandarins, peas, and strawberries can thrive in a place like Myrtle Beach, cause it allows for soooo much plant growth, but as I've said earlier, few people ever care about that.