So how cold was it in Toronto this year?

There was a lot of talk about the frigid arctic air 'hovering over Toronto' (or some such) this year, so I thought I'd check against our prairie cousin Edmonton.

It's actually quite easy to do this.

1. I went to wunderground.com (I know you can get the info from other sources, but I like the name) and looked up 'YYZ' for Toronto. I then clicked on 'Almanac for <today>', 'Custom', and entered Nov 1, 2014 to March 14, 2015 (Pi Day of course), clicked on 'Get History' then scrolled down to the bottom and clicked on 'Comma Delimited File'.
2. I then copied the data into Excel (didn't bother saving and then importing to Excel as I find it faster to just copy into Excel, then select 'Data', 'Text to Columns' and get the data in columns that way).
3. I repeated steps #1 and #2 for Edmonton and copied into a second tab in Excel
4. Finally, I created a 3rd tab that contained the same column headings and first column (date) and filled the cells with the Edmonton temperatures minus the Toronto ones. Then created a simple scatter chart (see below)

This whole exercise took less than 5 minutes - amazing what you can do with a basic source of info combined with a tool like Excel.

And the results? (Hopefully you can click on the picture below to get a slightly larger version). It looks like Edmonton was generally quite a bit colder in November/December (makes sense...it gets colder faster there) through to about Jan 12th. But after that, the graph is often in the positive range - meaning Edmonton was warmer! This is often because Edmonton's temperature is swinging to warm temperatures for a few days. Also - looking at the numbers - from Jan 13th onward Edmonton had 37 out of 60 days where the maximum temperature was warmer than Toronto's, but only 23 out of 60 days where the minimum temperature was warmer. So Edmonton still gets colder at night (it's probably all those darned cloudless days and nights :-) ).