Folks in Melbourne love a good performative brag about how cold it is on a winter morning at the best of times, but this morning we’ve actually got evidence to back it all up.
It was certifiably cold as shit in the Victorian capital this AM. So cold, in fact, that at one point it made Melbourne the coldest major city in the world for a hot (cold) second.
Melburnian commuters endured a frigid ride to work this morning, with clear skies and still breezes sending the air temperature down to just 3 degrees at 6:30am.
As the sun rose the temperature refused to go with it, registering a mark of 4 degrees – a mere one-degree rise – at 8:29am, right at morning peak hour.
Here’s the really interesting part: At that specific moment, Melbourne became the coldest major city on the planet. Both Canberra and Brisbane also ranked in the bottom three for temperatures, coming in at 6 and 7 degrees respectively.
But more interestingly, that meant Melbourne (Canberra and Brisbane too) were colder at that specific moment than perennially chilly centres like St John’s in Canada’s Newfoundland & Labrador region (8 degrees), Reykjavik in Iceland (9), La Paz in Bolivia (11), Anchorage in Alaska (13), and even Helsinki in Finland, which was experiencing a middle-of-the-night temperature of 14 at the time.
So there you go. It’s all well and good to state that 4 degrees is “not that cold,” but for one frigid moment this morning there was no city colder than Melbourne.
That oughta fuel the weather conversations for the next week or so, Victorian mates.
