The Christchurch marathon is being held on 5th June this year, and the race starts at 8:30 am. Since I plan to run it, I wanted to know what the temperature was likely to be. Fortunately, NIWA publishes the National Climate Database online for free, and with a few quick queries later, I had all the data I needed. Helpfully, the database exposes the 9 a.m. air temperatures from the "Screen Observations" of its stations (amongst many, many other metrics) which is close enough to the marathon start time (of course, we'd expect it to warm up over the course of the race, but this is a good start). Also helpfully, there is a station in Hagley Park around which the marathon is run.
The dataset provided every 9 a.m. reading going back to 1972, which I subsequently filtered to readings from the 5th Jun ± 4 days. A little excel-fu gives us our required stats and a pretty graph.
I am not a meterologist (nor a statistician), so I can't make informed predictions using the data. However, I can be confident about what the dataset itself says.
- Mean: 5.3 ºC
- Standard Deviation: 4.0 ºC
- 50% of temperatures were between 2.0 – 8.0 ºC
- 95% of temperatures were between -1.2 – 14.0 ºC
So what can we say? I'm sure there are rules about this sort of thing, but I'll say:
The temperature at the start of the 2016 Christchuch Marathon will probably be between 2–8 ºC. ❄️🏃
You can see the raw data below. Source: National Climate Database, NIWA. http://cliflo.niwa.co.nz/