Running the Numbers on the Weather in LA
Alex Schmidt had a post recently in LA Observed about the weather in LA:
Los Angeles has many characteristics worthy of criticism, but the usually unassailable one is the weather. A common conversation: “Dude, being in a car all day sucks.” “Yeah, but the weather is so great.”
Newsflash: the weather in L.A. sucks too.
I brought this up to a friend of mine, another native-born Angeleno, who had a relatively violent reaction to this which further prompted my curiosity about this blankly heretical statement (also because I enjoy trying to prove my friend wrong). I was somewhat convinced by the climatogolist Schmidt quoted:
What we don’t tell people is that the average is just a crossing point among the crazy weather that happens in between.
But Schmidt didn’t cite any data. I decided to run the numbers.
According to Weather Underground, from the 2001-2010 period LA averaged slightly over 108 days with an average temperature that was greater than 70 degrees. So, less than 1/3 of a year. However, if you look at the average high temperatures recorded, LA had 242 days over 70 degrees. Rain fell, on average, 41 days out of the year out of the 10-year period.
So does this mean that LA’s weather sucks? It’d be interesting to see the hourly weather details — I’d hazard a guess that we tend to only care about the weather primarily during daylight hours. And those daylight hours are the most likely times that Angelenos would experience the average high temperature instead of just the average temperature.
So the question is, is a temperature of greater than 70 degrees for 2/3 of the year enough for you?
