Colorado in general has very changeable weather, and Colorado Springs in particular is highly variable. We sit right beside the mountains, which interrupt airflows, etc. It’s fairly common to get two different seasons in one day. I know that a lot of places claim “If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes.” But Colorado Springs really means it.
On multiple occasions, I have seen rainfall while the sun was shining. I’ve seen a foot-plus of snow in October and in late April. 50-degree days in January are so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Successive days can easily have a 25-degree difference in their highs. I’ve seen spring days that are so warm at 8am that you hardly need a jacket at all, but by 3pm it’s 30 degrees and snowing hard.
If you don’t like the weather, but don’t want to passively wait around for it to change, just drive a few miles. We’ve got micro-climates out the wazoo.
One winter day several years ago, I was listening to the radio as I drove. Where I was, the sun was shining, and it was a nice day. As I drove, the radio announcer was telling about roads just 15 miles away that were being closed because of heavy snowfall.
I’m sure the mountains probably play into your local climate, but a good chunk of the midwest can claim those same weather patterns. At least where I’m from (Milwaukee), nothing about that seemed particularly odd. It should be mentioned that we have a giant lake nearby that does affect our weather. Enough so that the weather we can be totally different than the weather people 10 miles ‘inland’ have. People will come to my house, even just from the other side of the city, and say ‘wow, it’s a lot colder here’ or ‘why do you have 4 inches of snow, we didn’t get any?’.
And Thunder Snow, do you get Thunder Snow, that’s always fun when you’re not expecting thunder in the middle of January.
ETA, the wiki page on thunder snow links to a SD column by Una.
As Joey P noted, here in the Midwest we call this “Thursday”.
Since we don’t have a large body of water nearby, weather can (as does) change on a dime. Within the last month or so Minneapolis has had multiple 24 hour temperature swings of >40 degrees (F) - high temp changes of ~25 degrees are common pretty much every month. Last Friday (4/10) it was snowing (though not sticking) sideways at 9am, gray and foggy at 10 am, and sunny, warm , and a pleasant upper 50s by mid-afternoon.
Plus, you know, blizzards, torrential thunderstorms, a couple dozen subzero nights every year. And tornadoes.
Places in the Rockies and the Great Basin are more variable than, say, Mid-Atlantic states or California, but the Upper Midwest and the Great Plains probably have you beat.
This is not precisely an answer to what you are asking, inasmuch as every kind of weather can’t occur in every spot on the island, but the island of Hawaii (aka “the Big Island”) has nearly all of the world’s climates and is famous for the wide variety of conditions that can be found all within a short distance:
[QUOTE=http://hawaiicorrosionlab.org/diversity.htm]
The mountainous topography of the Hawaiian Islands makes the climate one of the most spatially diverse on Earth, and represents a miniature continent (T.W. Giambelluca, and T.A. Schroeder, “Climate,” Chapter in Atlas of Hawaii, Third Edition, ed. by S.P. Juvik, and J.O. Juvik, University of Hawaii Press, 1998.).
Rainfall, solar radiation, temperature, humidity, and wind vary significantly over relatively short distances. Humid tropical rain forest including the World’s wettest spot, arid and semi arid deserts, temperate, and frozen alpine ecosystems all exist in Hawaii.
[/QUOTE]
there are parts of the midwest that have real variable weather. especially in the middle to upper midwest of the USA then where the jet stream is can be hot and dry to winter. you will have a few days in a year that will have a 30 to 40 degree temperature difference (not due to day/night difference). this is less frequent in the extreme south or north but Texas can go from normal to blizzard in a day.
i do think for frequent massive differences you need a barrier nearby, like mountains. often the mountains are blocking but can be different. like the Chinook winds which can happen from Alberta to the southwest, those are fairly frequent.
I’ve definitely noticed in my 12+ years living in Colorado that people who live in Colorado think that Colorado has very changeable weather. But, as others have pointed out, in the Midwest we call this “Thursday.”
Not sure my current area counts as highly-variable, but it’s more variable than Colorado is. Over the weekend, let’s see: Work up Friday AM to 6" of snow. Snow & cold most of the morning, calmed down by the afternoon. Saturday: 80 degrees, sunny. Sunday: 75 degrees, windy, party cloudy. Monday AM, thunderstorms. Now it’s sunny again.
Edit: I had to include my favorite Colorado weather story. I had a coworker who was born & raised in Colorado who would INSIST to me that the Denver/Boulder area of Colorado got WAY MORE SNOW than my home town in Northern Michigan. Boulder gets 20-40 inches of snow a year. My hometown averages 180 inches of snow. This guy could not fathom that he was wrong, even when the entire office was laughing and telling him he had no idea what he was talking about.
Where I live we often have temps hotter than Dubai, in summer, more humid that Bali. In winter it’s often colder than Siberia (Polar vortex!) and frequently record snowfalls due to lake effect snow. (Which we can get from either direction!)
Boulder averages about 90" of snow in a season. We had 50" this February.
I don’t know where you Mindwesterners are getting your stories. I’ve lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin and now in Colorado, and it isn’t even close. Weather can be variable in the Midwest, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously like it does in Colorado. 6" of snow and 75° two days later? Pffff. That can happen in one afternoon in Colorado. I’ve seen it go from 50° to heavy snow while cooking some burgers on the grill in my backyard. That just doesn’t happen in the Midwest, unless you consider the Western Dakotas the Midwest.
The highest recorded temp in ND was 121F/49C in 1936. The lowest recorded temp was -60F/-51C, also in 1936. That’s exactly 100C/181F difference, cool trivia question!
This is pretty much completely untrue. Temperatures in Minneapolis, while certainly variable over days, tend to stay in a pretty narrow range. It may be 38° on a Tuesday and 65° on Thursday, but not at 2:00 PM and at 3:00 PM on the same day.
while with the mountains you might have a Chinook with a large temperature change aren’t the effects of that brief, a day or two? more frequent but short term.
while in the flatter midwest you could have a chance of 50F that could last for a week or more due to the jet stream and then switch back.
The Chinook winds do account for the massive short term changes (that doesn’t exist in the Midwest), but in Colorado you can easily have a week in January in the 60’s and have it be below 20° for the entire next week. That’s nothing unusual - it’s normal. It was 74° on February 7th and -6° on the 27th. It was above 50° on 13 days that month and below 40° (for the high) on 11. In the Midwest it’s pretty much cold from November to March. You don’t get a week in the middle where you can play golf in shorts.
Of course, the real answer to this question is Miami. In the summer, one day it can be high of 87, low of 62, rain at 3 pm. The next day–totally different–high 86, low 62, rain at 3:15 pm. Sure, there might be entire weeks when the high temp is exactly the same, but the low temp might be different by as much as one degree!
Tune in for the winter, when a three-degree drop in temperatures encourages the locals to bring out their knitted hats.
