I have chronic migraines. One of the triggers that moves me from “this headache sucks” to “death would be a mercy” is changes in barometric pressure. I am now looking for places to which I might re-locate that are barometrically the most stable. Preference is given to:
-Moderate to cold climates
-Cloudy over sunny (light triggered too)
-Within the US and/or simple immigration for US citizens
I would also welcome ideas on how to look for these places.
That was a harder question to research than I expected. I’m not real proud of my results.
Here is a list of US cities with their record highs & lows: https://www.wunderground.com/resources/pressure_records.asp
So that could be used to find places with low absolute variation or range. Portland is not one of them.
I suspect your issues aren’t triggered so much by amount of change as by rate of change. i.e. A place with a wide range that sloshed slowly and smoothly from, say, a high in January to a low in June and back might be better for you than a place with a smaller range but it cycled from high to low back to high every single day.
I was not able to readily find anything on location vs. rate of change. My weather intuition says those places are going to be either rare or at the poles.
OTOH, there’s also this: Weather pains - Wikipedia.
Good luck in any case; chronic migraine is a major PITA. I assume you’ve tried every prescription med out there? I don’t have the problem but my wife gets them a couple times per month. Relpax is the latest magic wand for her. It kills the pain almost completely but she’s still pretty unambitious and real nappy on migraine days.
Yeah, the poles …
However, you might look into the tropics … you’d lose the “cool” and the “USA” parts and you wouldn’t get much cloudiness, but that’s maybe the best choice if you want more stable pressures … that whole “cloudy” scenario requires changes in pressure, “USA” is mostly located in the temperate zones and these are the more chaotic zones in terms of weather systems and their associated changes in pressure … “cool” you can have up in the polar zones, like Barrow, Alaska …
Anywhere you go, the best you’ll get is less often …
I suspect that the best places for barometric variation are also going to be consistently the least cloudy. Which means that you need to weight by how strong of a trigger each is for you, and which makes this problem even more difficult. And then there’s the possibility of nonlinear interactions between the different triggers: Maybe bright light or pressure swings either one make only a very small difference by themselves, but both together bring on a terrible migraine, for instance.
The best solution method is probably experimental: Go visit a whole bunch of places and keep track of how bad your migraines are in each one.
Have you considered that maybe you’ve developed an allergic reaction to grass pollen? … Oregon is a big place, but the Willamette Valley is known to bring on these types of allergies … and there’s no shortage of grass pollen ever … my train of thought here starts with knowing enough people who never experience grass allergies moving to the Valley and all of a sudden, they’re allergic to grass pollen; the next stop on our way is that changes in barometric pressure almost always picks the wind up in the Valley, stirring up all the pollen and moving it about; lastly, Linn County is considered the grass pollen Capital of the World, I usually go through my house with a leaf blower at the beginning of summer just to blow out all the accumulated pollen and be done with my own allergies for the year …
Try a decent quality face mask next frontal system to come by, that should be in just a few hours from now …
Chronos has a great idea, try Cape Town, South Africa … maybe clockwise spinning barometric pressure will be different …
Thank you for the ideas everyone.
ChronosIf I have to choose pressure changes over cloudy, pressure changes definitely are worse. I can (and do) wear special contacts and glasses that filter the colors of light that cause the most problems.
LSLGuy I think you may be onto something with rate of change. I’ll start trying to track that as well as simply “change”.
watchwolf49 I will watch the allergen front. I don’t think that’s what is happening, based on experience living many places, and medications, and so on, but it is interesting. If it turns out to be a contributing factor, it’s at least something I could get treated for.
I remembered seeing a map of day-to-day pressure changes in a book years ago. Luckily, that page of that book is available on Google Books. Map (page 80 of the book it it doesn’t take you there). Unfortunately the map is only for the month of February, and only for the contiguous 48 states. In general, south is better than north and west is better than east.
Chances are that NOAA also released similar maps for the other months and maybe for Alaska and Hawaii, but I haven’t been able to track them down.
Now compare that map to a map of annual hours of sunlight. As suggested by Chronos, the areas that are stable in pressure also tend to be sunny. Southernmost Florida has the most stable pressure (at least in February) and gets fewer annual sunny hours than the desert Southwest.
Here’s some current information about Pensionado visas for Costa Rica …
bibliophage that book looks awesome. I will track it down.
watchwolf49 I’ll check out Costa Rica. It certainly looks like it would be straightforward to immigrate.