Mexican climate zones; computing exact climate zone at arbitrary locale
Ahoy — Climate zone maps are surprisingly hard to come by. The one Martin posted here includes Canada, but not Mexico: https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/climate-zone-map-including-canada
Where can I find a map for all of North America? We’re particularly interested in Baja California and the west coast of mainland Mexico. Not urgent, but something I’ve been looking for for about a month, unsuccessfully.
To wit, the maps I’ve seen are somewhat coarse. But climate can vary a lot within a purported Zone 2, for example. Most of Southern Arizona is hot desert, but there are mountains that get up to 9,500 feet. We wouldn’t live on top of such a mountain, but we might live in its cool foothills. Is there a way to get climate zones at a more granular level? Like a zip code lookup? Or perhaps there’s a way to compute a climate zone with the kind of data that would be on the Wikipedia page of a city or town? Cabo is probably too easy, but this is the kind of data I’m talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabo_San_Lucas#Climate
Thanks for your help.
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Find a nearby weather station and look up the annual heating & cooling degree-days. IECC zones are defined by the 25 year average annual HDD & CDD for the location:
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/all-about-climate-zones
Thanks Dana. It looks like I need to dig more into this. Where do you find weather stations?
Köppen climate classification may provide a high level perspective.
For more finely tuned recent weather data:
https://www.degreedays.net/
There are a number of weatherstation with reasonable data sets in Baja California & elsewhere on that site.
It may be possible infer the CDD-10C & HDD-18C data somewhat from figure 5a, in this document:
https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2010_saenz_romero_c001.pdf
Better yet, eyeball the seasonal average outdoor temps for particular locations on Weatherspark's databases:
https://weatherspark.com/y/2918/Average-Weather-in-Cabo-San-Lucas-Mexico-Year-Round
https://weatherspark.com/m/2918/1/Average-Weather-in-January-in-Cabo-San-Lucas-Mexico#Sections-Temperature
https://weatherspark.com/m/2918/8/Average-Weather-in-August-in-Cabo-San-Lucas-Mexico#Sections-Temperature