It’s that time of the year again, when my husband and I start arguing over the cat. We’re not arguing over normal things, like who’s going to feed it, or who’s going to clear out its litter tray, instead we’re arguing about who gets to sit on the sofa with it on their lap. Our cat, the portable hot water bottle, has never been so popular.
We’re clearly not the only ones who have noticed the sudden chill in the air. Everywhere you look, people are bundled up with coats and scarves, muttering about the weather. A kind gentleman even stopped me on the street a few days ago to warn me it was too cold for my baby to be out! I pointed out that we were from England, which is usually far colder than Qatar, but it didn’t seem to deter him.
A number of people have asked me if it’s usual for it to be this cold in Qatar. While it’s not unusual to have weather this cold in Qatar in winter, the cold snap was a little surprising because it happened fairly late in winter. 
I think that a number of people were counting their chickens, thinking that the winter weather was already over, when in reality it hadn’t really begun. To be fair, the weather had been pretty warm; on 25 January the temperature soared to a sultry 27C (81F). I even heard someone in a supermarket complaining it was too hot!
However, almost as soon as those words were uttered, the temperature started to drop. The next day, the top temperature was 22C (72F), and two days later, the temperature struggled to reach just 16C (61F). In Doha, where the air is dry, 16C feels cool. This January, that temperature of 16C felt even cooler thanks to the lack of sunshine, after all we’re not used to clouds in Doha! 
The thing that really made it feel chilly though, was the wind. It was gusting up to 45 kilometres per hour, and was what my Grandad would describe as a lazy wind, meaning it would travel straight through you, rather than round you.
Certainly 28 January was a windy, cool day, but what made it feel even colder was the contrast to the weather that we had been enjoying beforehand. The drop of 11C (20F) in just three days made a cool day feel like a very cold one. Had the temperature gradually dropped over the previous weeks, the cold snap wouldn’t have felt quite so pronounced.
Whenever I feel chilly, it always makes me feel warmer and more fortunate if I look at the temperature of some of the nearby cities just to the north of us, because they’re usually significantly lower than the temperature in Doha. That’s because our coldest weather occurs when the winds blow from the northwest, but the air generally passes over the Gulf before it reaches us. The mild waters of the sea warm up the air and add moisture to it, making it milder and less dry by the time it reaches our shores. This is a blessing in a country which isn’t well equipped to deal with cold weather.
This year, the lowest temperature we have reached so far in Doha was in the early hours of 30 January, when the temperature dropped to 10C (50F). However, in Baghdad the same cold snap lowered the temperature to minus 2C (28F); in Kuwait it dropped to freezing (32F); and in Riyadh, the temperature hovered around 1C (34F). Clearly, we have a lot to thank the warm Gulf waters for!
Generally, the lowest temperature in a day will be recorded about half an hour after sunrise. This seems strange to many people, who would assume that the coldest time should be in the dead of the night or just before sunrise, but it’s because the sun is initially quite weak. Obviously the sun isn’t heating the earth during the night, so heat is continually being lost. This ensures the temperature will generally fall throughout the night. However, when the sun pops over the horizon, it is still weak, so for the first half an hour there is still more heat being lost, than is being added by the sun.
As the sun rises higher in the sky, of course, its rays get stronger. Even in the recent cool weather, it still feels warm when you stand in the sunshine. By the end of February, the sun will feel even stronger and the temperatures will be climbing much higher. We should bear in mind that this cold snap will not last long, so rather than complain about it, maybe we should embrace it.