Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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The major-party tickets for president and vice president have more diversity than any in U.S. history, and that has nothing to do with race, gender or politics.

I'm talking about climate diversity. The places of birth and current residences of the four major-party candidates cover almost the entire breadth of possible U.S. climate zones.

If you've read this column over the years, you should know that I don't do politics in this space. The only bias I've been accused of is cold-weather bias.

But by looking through a variety of Web sites ranging from the National Weather Service to Weather Underground (which in this case has nothing to do with 1960s radical Bill Ayers) and HometownUSA.com, I've put together a climatic snapshot of this presidential race.

One conclusion: The Republican ticket is the most extreme in history -- when it comes to annual temperatures.

Phoenix, where Sen. John McCain has lived (OK, we're not getting into all those other houses here), sizzles with a July average high temperature of 104 degrees. Wasilla, Alaska, the hometown of his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, shivers with a January average low temperature of 4 degrees.

That's a 100-degree spread in average temperature over the course of a year, unprecedented for a presidential-vice presidential ticket.

It's also a dry ticket.

Phoenix, in the Desert Southwest, averages barely more than 8 inches of rainfall a year, much of it in a spectacularly stormy monsoon season late each summer. Wasilla gets 17 inches of rain and melted snow. Add those two figures together, and it's barely more than Roanoke's worst drought year on record.

Wasilla averages about 50 inches of snow a winter, but tops 100 inches some winters. Whether you like her or not, my many winter-loving readers would gladly take Palin's snow totals, don'tcha know.

Snow is to Southwest Virginia weather what Palin is to politics -- loved or detested, but always much discussed.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's Chicago area doesn't usually hurt for snow, either, averaging about 38 inches each year. Chicago -- really a not-all-that-windy city, compared nationally -- experiences a chilly average January low of 14 degrees.

Summers are occasionally brutal -- the 1995 Chicago heat wave, with a maximum temperature of 106 and a heat index topping 120, killed more than 600.

More often, summers are quite tolerable, about 20 degrees cooler on average than McCain's Phoenix. Sometimes the margin is more like 50 degrees, when the Lake Michigan breeze is cooling Chicago while the desert sun broils Phoenix close to 120. (But it's a dry heat.)

With air masses from the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico often colliding overhead, "change" is indeed a common theme for the weather in the region Obama represents.

It was harder to find data on Sen. Joe Biden's Greenville, Del., home. Using nearby Wilmington as a guide, you might be surprised to find that Delaware is slightly warmer and much stickier in the summer than Roanoke, and a little warmer and slightly less snowy in the winter, owing to the effects of the Gulf Stream-driven ocean currents just offshore.

But Delaware occasionally gets slammed by Atlantic hurricanes and big nor'easters, hurling wind-whipped rain or snow, which might mean Joe the Senator would have to become Joe the Plumber or even Joe the Snow Shoveler every now and then.

The climatic diversity grows when you consider that none of the four now lives in the area in which they were born.

McCain and Obama were each born in tropical climates -- McCain in the Panama Canal Zone, Obama in Hawaii. Biden was born in Scranton, Pa., an Appalachian climate similar to ours, except colder. Palin was born in a Rocky Mountains climate in Idaho.

If I see a weakness in the tickets in terms of weather experience, it's severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, because the South and Plains states are uncharacteristically left out of this election. Obama's Chicago area is on the fringe of Tornado Alley, though his mother was from Kansas, the heart of it.

Past elections such as Clinton vs. Dole (Arkansas and Kansas) in 1996 and Bush vs. Gore (Texas and Tennessee) in 2000 could rightfully be called Tornado Alley elections.

A commenter on my blog pointed out that Libertarian candidate Bob Barr fills in the gap nicely, having been born in Iowa and now living in Georgia, adding the Plains and the South to the mix.

In any event, on Tuesday, we'll decide who gets to respond to national weather disasters the next four years.

The winner gets to live in a big house amid the drained-out swamp turned urban jungle of Washington, with its sticky, hazy summers and constant flow of political hot air that envelops the nation.

Give me snowshoeing in Alaska, witnessing the Arizona monsoon season, or walking along Delaware beaches or beside Lake Michigan over that any day.