By Steff Gaulter

 

Welcome to 2013. Let’s hope Doha’s weather continues where 2012 left off: pleasantly mild. I realised just how mild it was on December 29. This is the date that some friends of mine always have a gathering in the garden of their villa.

It’s invariably a great night, but often we’ll be huddled in our coats, trying to prevent the wind from chilling us to the bone. This year was different, people left their coats at home, and many people were in short sleeves.

It wasn’t just that one night either: last month as a whole was very mild. The average December day time maximum temperature is 24oC (75oF), and the low is 15oC (59oF). Last month the average was 1oC higher during the day, and 3oC higher at night. In fact, out of the last 10 years, only two Decembers have been warmer.

I know everyone likes different weather, and I know there are quite a few people who were hoping for cooler weather, but I’ve loved the mild weather! Personally I see the mild winters and lack of perpetual rain as a large benefit of living in Qatar, and I know I’m not the only one! However, the bad news is that this mild weather is unlikely to stick around for the entire winter.

January is usually the coldest month in Doha. The average daytime temperature is 21.7oC (71oF), and the night time minimum is 12.8oC (55oF). That still doesn’t sound too bad, but given that I saw someone wearing earmuffs when the temperature was 22oC, you could well find it colder than you might expect!

Living in Qatar, we’re less exposed to low temperatures than other parts of the globe. We start feeling cold when people from elsewhere would still be in T-shirts. After all, we all know about the stereotypical ‘Brits abroad’, eating ice creams when the locals are shivering. I’ve been guilty of it myself; I went to Florida with a group of friends and we took a trip to the amusement park Busch Gardens.

We didn’t have to queue for anything, and spent hours on water slides and roller coasters. Eventually one of us asked a security guard why the place was deserted. He looked at us incredulously, before composing himself and explaining, “Because it’s cold.”

When you move to another part of the world it takes six weeks to acclimatise fully to the weather, with the first two weeks being the most important. That’s not to say that you will ever be as good as the locals at enduring the weather, but after about six weeks, it will be as good as it is going to get!

However, even if two people grew up and lived in the same city, what one person finds cold, the other person might find warm. There are many reasons for this including how much fat a person has, what their metabolic rate is, how much they’ve eaten and how tired they are. 

Have you ever noticed that women often feel colder than men? That’s because they have a more evenly distributed layer of fat under their skin. When people get cold, they conserve heat by reducing the blood flow to their skin. When a woman does this, the blood moves below the layer of fat, and the temperature of her skin drops. However, a man will tend not to experience such a big change.

In Doha, most of us, men and women, will find the weather cold at some point in the next month or so, simply because we’re not used to it. The cold blast can arrive suddenly, as the winds pick up. At this time of year, the prevailing direction of our wind is northerly, and this wind can be bitterly cold. However, it’s worth remembering that things would be a lot worse, if it weren’t for the waters of the Gulf.

Places to the north of us are already far cooler than Doha. In January, the average daytime temperature in Baghdad is 15.5oC (60oF) and the average night-time minimum is 4oC (39oF); in Kuwait, the average high temperature is 19.5oC (67oF) and the low temperature is 8.5oC (47oF).

It’s colder to the north of us, because as the air generally moves south, across Iraq and Kuwait, it has to work its way across the Gulf towards us in Qatar. The waters of the Gulf are generally quite mild, so they warm up the air and add moisture to it. By the time it arrives in Qatar, it has changed quite significantly, which is a relief in a country which isn’t designed for cold weather. Last year the coldest it got in Doha was 8oC (46oF) in the early hours of January 23. Away from the heat of the city, other parts of Qatar did report lower temperatures than this, but other countries to the north of us were far cooler.

The same weather system dragged temperatures in Baghdad down to -1oC (30oF), in Riyadh it dropped to minus -2oC (28oF) and at Kuwait Airport it was rather a chilly plus 3oC (37oF). As well as being cold, the air was also incredibly dry, with humidity down to just 11% in Kuwait. This would make the weather feel even colder than it actually was.

The mild waters of the Gulf should protect us from the more severe cold spells this year too. Obviously we can’t accurately forecast the weather we can expect in Doha for the rest of the winter, but the lowest ever recorded temperature was 3.6oC (38oF), which occurred back in 1964. That would clearly feel ridiculously cold for us lily-livered Doha-dwellers. If by some fluke it does get that cold this year, as we huddle around our little fan heaters, we can console ourselves by imagining just how cold it must be elsewhere.

 

(The author is Senior Weather Presenter at Al Jazeera English channel. She can be contacted on [email protected] or on Twitter at @WeatherSteff)