The last day of August seems as significant as the last day of the year. In fact, there is a place on Earth where the temperatures today can be as cold as Christmas right now.
Where is it? Oymyakon, Russia. I looked it up and today it is actually 19 degrees Celsius. So where is the coldest place right now? I found a chart of the hottest and coldest. There is a place in the Antartica that is currently -110.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the other end of the scale, the hottest place is Basrah-Hussen in Iraq at 119.3 degrees Fahrenheit. I found these at the eldoradoweather.com site.
Antarctica isn't a place to most of us. One can only imagine scientists living there. The only visitors we can imagine are tourists. That pretty well describes Antarctica. It doesn't have a spring or fall - just summer and winter. It has no commercial industries, no towns or cities and no permanent residents. There are numerous scientific bases - 65 in total. You can read about it here in Cool Antarctica. So whoever is there now may be able to say that summer is turning to winter.
At the opposite end of the weather spectrum, things are quite different. People live in Basra-Hussen in Iraq. It is an ancient city. It is one of the ports from which Sinbad the Sailor journeyed. During the summer months, it is consistently one of the hottest cities on the planet, where temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Add to that high humidity sometimes exceeding 90% because of tis proximity to the marshy Persian Gulf.
So I guess heat wins over cold in human habitation. A few pictures from Grimsby Beach's Painted Ladies today. There's whimsy and fun on the Lake - no worries about the hottest or coldest there.
