One of our favorite things to be annoyed by, here at The Barking Crow, is this:
The weather changes, guys. That’s what it does.
But after Texas’s shift last week—a sixty-degree swing over the span of five or six days (man, does it ever feel like Mother Nature is gaslighting you when it’s 75 degrees and sunny after you spent all week getting up in the night to make sure your pipes weren’t freezing and bursting)—I was feeling both sympathetic and curious. So I asked:
Where is the weather the most volatile?
Thankfully for my workload, FiveThirtyEight answered a question very much like this one in 2014. They looked at how much daily weather, measured by fourteen statistics across three categories (temperature, precipitation, severe weather), varied from historic averages on a daily basis. So if the average high temperature in Austin is 60 degrees in February, but every single day in a given February has a high of either 70 or 50, the variance would be ten degrees wide.
The most volatile weather? Our beloved upper Midwest. In one sense of that phrase.
The Dakotas, the area around the western half of Lake Superior, and a slice of Montana just east of the Rockies (which admittedly isn’t Midwestern but is on the edge of the Plains) have the most volatile weather, by this measurement (which seems like a good one, if you ask me). The southern half of Texas, meanwhile, is fairly predictable, as is the West Coast, Florida, and most chunks of the Southwest and the Rockies. The Plains are the most unpredictable, and then the rest of the country—forestland historically, I believe—is unpredictable but not wildly so.
So, the next time you’re annoyed because someone is acting like weather is a phenomenon specific to their own life experience, you now know. But you should still probably keep it to yourself. Silly thing to pick a fight about (yes, I’m writing this to myself).
Here’s the 538 map:
