Where to find the worst weather in the US

Which US city has the worst weather? To answer that question, data analyst Taras Kaduk counted the number of pleasant days in each city and ranked them accordingly. For this analysis, a "pleasant" day is one where the average temperature was in the range 55°F-75°F, the maximum was in the range 60°-90°, the minimum was in the range 40°-70°, and there was no significant rain or snow. (The weather data was provided by the NOAA Global Surface Summary of the Day dataset and downloaded to R with the rnoaa package.)

With those criteria and focusing just on the metro regions with more than 1 million people, the cities with the fewest pleasant days are:

1. San Juan / Carolina / Caguas, Puerto Rico (hot year-round)
2. Rochester, NY (cold in the winter, rain in the summer)
3. Detroit / Warren / Dearborn, MI (cold in the winter, rain in the summer)

You can see the top (bottom?) 25 cities in this list in the elegant chart below (also by Tara Kaduk), which shows each city as a polar bar chart and with one ring for each of the 6 years of data analyzed. 

And if you're wondering which cities have the best weather, here's the corresponding chart for the 25 cities with the most pleasant days. San Diego / Carlsbad (CA) tops that list.

You can find the R code behind the analysis and charts in this Github repository. (The polar charts above required a surprisingly small amount of code: it's a simple transformation of a regular bar chart with the ggplot2 coord_polar transformation — quite appropriate given the annual cycle of weather data.) And for the full description of the analysis including some other nice graphical representations of the data, check out the blog post linked below.

Taras Kaduk: Where are the places with the best (and the worst) weather in the United States

Comments

[aditya d shetty]

The hyperlinks on both images point to the image with the 'least pleasant days'

[David Smith]

Thanks for spotting that. It should be fixed now.

[Stephen Lightfoote]

Very "cool".

[Adam Sparks]

Neither rnoaa nor GSODR were used for this? From the article,

I pull raw files from NOAA’s FTP server instead of using rnoaa of GSODR packages.

I assume "or" is meant here, not "of" and rnoaa doesn't offer the GSOD data access that I know of.

[John Bowman]

Didn't you used to be at Rice? How could you have left humidity out of the equation? :)