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LA called the city with the 'most pleasant' weather in the US
A summer day at Santa Monica Pier.
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Phil Scoville/flickr Creative Commons
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While the rest of the country huddles indoors to avoid the cold and snow, Southern Californians enjoy plenty of sunshine and mild temperatures (despite a few millimeters of rain).
So it comes as no surprise that Los Angeles earns the honor of having the Most Pleasant Weather in the U.S. — with 183 days of "pleasant" weather a year — at least by the reckoning of Kelly Norton, a designer and software engineer from Georgia, according to The Atlantic's Cities blog.
In his map, "The pleasant places to live," Norton plotted a list of the top five U.S. cities with the most pleasant weather, which he defined thusly, according to the Cities blog:
Being from Atlanta, the engineer defined pleasant using rather Southern parameters: The mean temperature must be between 75 and 55 degrees, and the day's minimum can't drop below 45 nor the max exceed 85. Using that criteria and a mother lode of meteorological data from NOAA, he was able to elicit what are allegedly the country's most fair-weather burgs. Not surprisingly, they are all in California.
Norton also calculated the average number of pleasant days for five other cities that he said had the least pleasant weather, based on an analysis of 23 years of NOAA data. They are Mc Allister, Mont. (14 days); Northeast of Reno, Nev. (15 days); Clancy, Mont. (15 days); Douglas, Wyo. (15 days); and East of Cedarville, Calif. (16 days).
On his website, Norton writes:
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It has been a winter of dreadful weather so far. I spent January flying back and forth from New York expecting to find a different set of conditions at the end of each leg. Whichever way I went, bitter cold greeted me at the end of the jet way and often with a coating of slick ice. It’s hard not to dwell on anomalous and unpleasant weather. It got me wondering, though, where in the U.S. do you go if you want the most “pleasant” days in a year?
Here's a map with a list of cities with the most and least pleasant weather:
(Map by Monica Luhar)
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