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La Quiaca is the northernmost town of Argentina and Ushuaia is the southernmost. Both of them experience similar yearly average temperatures and rainfall, but out of this, they can't be more different.
Ushuaia is fairly well known, it has a typical subpolar oceanic climate with very low annual and daily temperature ranges. It can get either rain or snow any time of the year and it's very humid, windy and cloudy throughout the year.
La Quiaca has an inusual climate, a kind of dry monsoon highland virtually restricted to the Andean Plateau. It has stormy and cloudy summers, the rest of the year is extremely dry and sunny with very high daily ranges.
La Quiaca is for all purposes subtropical highland, given enough rainfall, and is an A-/B+, while Ushuaia, though home to scenery that seems equally spectacular as S/SE Alaska, is too raw and gloomy, and I grade it a C. Would definitely want to visit the Tierra del Fuego and take a road trip across Argentina (in much the same manner as the pre-revolutionary Che Guevara) someday
Mark Twain was supposed to have said, "The coldest winter I ever felt was a summer in San Francisco". An apt saying, that, if any of you ever spent a summer there. Too bad there is no record he ever actually said that.
The same thing applies even more strongly in Ushuaia. I know of no other large southern hemisphere city that has summers as wretched as Ushuaia's. Punta Arenas isn't so great for summer warmth, either but even it is better. My own inadequately heated burg of Corvallis, Oregon beats U's warmest month summer average highs by mid March. March, mind you!
Can't find the sunshine hours and maybe the Argentines don't track that but I would guess about 1100 to 1400. Better than Chile's immediate coast but pretty poor all the same.
Adequate sunshine's no problem for La Quiaca but its 12000 feet of elevation is. At that altitude, there is not much in the way of an atmospheric blanket to screen out all that UV; problematic for folks a whole lot darker than I. 22 degrees latitude also insures there is not much relief even in the southern winter.
D or thereabouts for both, for entirely different reasons.
I make La Quiaca a steppe climate (Koppen BSh)- average annual temp 8.1*20= 162, plus 280 for more than 70% of rain in the warm season = 442mm threshold: La Quiaca' s average of 334.5 is below that but more than half of it.
Neither are great (Ushuaia too cloudy, no snow in La Quiaca because of the dry winters) but I'll just give it to La Quiaca.
Tight poll... I think I prefer Ushuaia, but maybe I'm a bit biased by non-climatic issues, basically the lack of oxygen at La Quiaca's altitude, which anyway has the efect of increasing the UV Index, that is huge in that place.
To the people asking for the sunshine hours, averages from 1961-1990:
La Quiaca: 3440 hours/year
Ushuaia: 1356 hours/year
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