Bad weather have you bummed? Kelly Norton, a designer and software engineer living in Atlanta, Ga., has created an interactive map that makes it possible to find U.S. cities with the most "pleasant" days in a year.
We first saw Norton's map posted at The Atlantic Cities by John Metcalfe.
Pleasant means different things to different people, but Norton defines it as place were the mean temperature is between 55 degrees and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The maximum daily temperature doesn't go above 85 degrees or dip below 45 degrees. Norton also considered precipitation. Days with greater than .010 inches of precipitation or greater than .1 inches of snow were not viewed as pleasant, Norton told Business Insider through email.
Norton used 23 years of data collected by NOAA weather stations around the country to create the map shown below. The darker the circles, the greater number of pleasant days.
"I constructed the map by breaking the country up into a grid and then looking at the weather stations that fall within each of [the] squares in the grid," Norton said. "I use a zip code database to determine which zip codes fall within each region. I name each region by its most populous city." Los Angeles has two circles because it's large enough to be the most populous city in two regions.
To find out exactly how many "pleasant" days a city has, just type in the zip code and it will return a chart that tells you the total number of pleasant days as well as a month-by-month breakdown. For instance, New York City has, on average, 67 pleasant days each year. Most of those nice days occur in September.
For anyone who's planning their winter escape, here's a quick list of the U.S. cities with the best and worst weather:
The 5 most pleasant places:
Los Angeles - 183 days/year
San Diego- 182 days/year
Oxnard - 166 days/year
Simi Valley - 156 days/year
San Francisco - 153 days/year
The 5 least pleasant places:
McAllister, Montana - 14 days/year
Northeast of Reno, Nevada - 15 days/year
Clancy, Montana - 15 days/year
Douglas, Wyoming -15 days/year
East of Cedarville, California - 16 days/year
To see more cities, go play around with the interactive map here »