4 ms·
Looking at the variance as a single datapoint doesn't capture temperature information very well. A single rare outlier data will make a city look bad even if mo
by munificent 4y ago
Looking at the variance as a single datapoint doesn't capture temperature information very well. A single rare outlier data will make a city look bad even if most days are milkd.
I hacked together a little program to try something different. My rule was to look at the daily average temperature for a bunch of cities on a single year. Then count up the number of "good temperature" days which I defined to be within 60°F-80°F. The best cities are the ones with the most good days.
Based on that, looking at US cities, the top and bottom ten are:
282 : San Diego, California
256 : Los Angeles, California
236 : Orlando, Florida
203 : Honolulu, Hawaii
202 : Jacksonville, Florida
199 : West Palm Beach, Florida
193 : Tampa St. Petersburg, Florida
189 : Asheville, North Carolina
179 : Charleston, South Carolina
...
92 : Duluth, Minnesota
91 : Casper, Wyoming
89 : Concord, New Hampshire
89 : Great Falls, Montana
87 : Sault Ste Marie, Michigan
80 : Caribou, Maine
76 : Salt Lake City, Utah
64 : Anchorage, Alaska
63 : Fairbanks, Alaska
41 : Juneau, Alaska
That looks about right to me.
- nullgeo 4y agoBob, are you using the same data as the OP?
- thefringthing 4y agoNope; I used the Wikipedia article I mentioned. This is a different, more detailed, table of temperature data.
- munificent 4y agoNo idea. I just searched for "average city temperature CSV" and ended up downloading some file from Kaggle.
- quesera 4y agoThis is interesting. It doesn't capture humidity / heat index, which would drop at least five cities (FL, SC) out of the top ten.
- munificent 4y agoYeah, if you really want to pick a city by weather, you'd want to take into account more than just temperature. Amount of sunlight is important too, from cloud cover and day length based on latitude.
- freediver 4y agoMakes sense, San Diego and anything on Hawaii is hard to beat for 'comfort'. If you account for outdoor diversity then moving bit north to Silicon Valley makes sense. Warmer than San Francisco, with great skiing 4 hours away.
- angarg12 4y agoCan you please share the code? Or show the results for other continents.
- munificent 4y agoThe code is too hacky to share. Basically, I got a CSV of daily average temperatures for a bunch of cities. I discarded all the rows except for ones in the US and within a single year. Then, for each city, I just counted the number of days whose temperature was within a range. I had to do a little massaging because for some reason Washington DC was double counted in there.
- sidpatil 4y agoThis seems related to the concept of the degree day. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_day
- wolverine876 4y agoThose Florida cities get pretty hot in the summer, no?