In an earlier post I ranked Australian cities according to their degree of weather obsession. This was based on data from the original Oz Weather web application, which was receiving a few hundreds hits per day.
I am now in a position to provide a second opinion – this time based on a much greater volume of data from the Oz Weather native application, which currently receives around 10 to 15,000 queries per day. And again, Canberra is the clear winner.
The following list shows the ratio of unique weather queries to Oz Weather per head of population, indexed on Canberra’s data, for the last month (older web app rankings in parentheses).
* Canberra – 100% (100%)
* Darwin – 72% (59%)
* Brisbane – 72% (25%)
* Hobart – 65% (75%)
* Melbourne – 64% (68%)
* Sydney – 56% (29%)
* Adelaide – 34% (41%)
* Perth – 32% (30%)
The biggest single change is for Brisbane (up from 25% lowest ranked to 72% equal 2nd ranked). This probably reflects some of the recent spectacular weather they have had ie. several outbreaks of severe storms.
The other overall change is the elevation of tropical and semi-tropical cities to the upper end of ranking at the expense of the more temperate cities. This may reflect that the weather in the more tropical cities is relatively benign in winter, but more prone to extreme conditions in summer, whereas the opposite tends to be more true of more temperate locations.
Given that local weather events and seasonal effects seem to have such an impact, it will probably require a much longer period of time of analysis to even these out – perhaps a full year. However, given that Canberra has been a clear leader in both analyses so far, it seem safe to allow it to maintain its status of most-weather obsessed city in Australia.
Ajnaware's Weblog 