grammarwoman | (Reply)

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A few places do get snow, but they are mostly resorts and so on, not cities. It can get cold in winter (that is 10c to around 3c, and occaisionally lower, but not below -10c anywhere people regularly live). It often feels colder, though, taking wind-chill into account -- we have some of the windiest cities in the world. It also gets surprising cold at night outside of the cities (bricks and roads etc work as a heat bank), because most of the inland is desert, so hot in the day, cold at night, very cold at night in winter.

You probably think that sounds very mild. But that only tells half the story. Our summers are actually the extreme weather season. They are very very hot. 28c to 35c is common, which isn't so bad, but it's typical to have stretches of weather of a week or more where every day is between 36c to 48c, and typically hotter inland. The hole in the ozone layer is better, but you will still get burned in direct sunlight within 15 minutes in the middle of the day, no matter your skin type. In cities the gardens tend to make it a humid heat, but outside of them it's so dry you are likely to dehydrate without even realising it -- our deserts tend to be really dry, and that probably sounds obvious, duh it's a desert, but deserts I've seen in other countries still have water on the ground in places (rivers and so on), and ours do not in the same way. And in February, the hottest month, cyclones regularly come down the coast, so it's ~38c and humid while it's coming, then gale force winds and rain with a bit of a temp drop, and then back to ~38c and humid.

Basically, imagine an exact inversion of your weather. Instead of extreme cold in winter, we get extreme heat in summer, with all of what that implies. It's superficially easier, because we don't need to clear snow etc, but you can die pretty easily if you don't take it seriously.