Good and bad weather
By 
Scott’s post yesterday about Phoenix’s hellish heat wave — every day in July except the last one hit at least 110 — included the observation that many people seem to equate “good weather” with “no really cold and/or snowy conditions.”
Which got me to thinking, what is good weather, exactly?
Obviously this is an extremely subjective question, which means you are all free to scream at each other in the comments for Doing It Wrong.
Lets consider various factors.
Heat and cold
Extremes here are almost by definition bad, but what will seem extreme will vary a lot by individual and region.
Humidity
Humidity is an underrated factor I believe. About 25 years ago a colleague who was moving to a law school in Dallas was trying to convince me to go as well, and he kept pointing out that the average high in Dallas in the summer was really pretty close to the average high in Boulder. I was like, have you BEEN to Dallas in the summer?
This is even more true when it comes to winter conditions, I think. The bone-piercing cold of 20 degrees in Chicago bears no resemblance at all to 20 degrees in Denver, which when it’s sunny and windless barely even feels cold if you’re used to Chicago.
Wind
This is another often overlooked variable. I happen to really hate strong winds, and there are places in these United States where the wind blows pretty much all the time.
Precipitation
For me, rain is good in small(ish) doses, as is snow. An occasional cloudy Wagnerian day is a good break from perpetual sunshine. On the other hand . . .,
Sunshine
Seasonal affective disorder is real.
Seasonality
I would hate to live somewhere where the weather is always more or less the same. Colorado is close to optimal in this regard, as it normally has four distinct seasons, which in my experience not many places in the USA do, or at least not in any sustained sort of way.
Anyway, the weather in the vast majority of the USA is pretty bad overall. I would rate Boulder-Denver as an 8.5 out of 10 in this metric, given the variables listed above. Michigan was a 2.5 in the 1970s but might be a 4 now (yay climate change!). The entire Deep South is hell on Earth, the Midwest is bad, the East Coast is bad, etc.
. . . As a special bonus for our longtime readers, here’s a passage from my new book A Fan’s Life about watching the Rose Bowl on TV in Michigan in the 1970s:
It’s difficult to convey now what watching the Rose Bowl was like back then. For one thing, imagine Michigan in winter – and not the comparatively mild winters that have visited the state subsequently because of the effects of climate change, but the brutal, unending winters of the 1970s. These consisted of five straight months of bone chilling cold, underneath a monotonous slate gray sky that allowed the sun to appear for perhaps half an hour twice per month. The landscape itself was dominated by enormous drifts of slushy snow, that on a typical day were fed by an almost constant depressive staccato of tiny snowflakes, buffeted here and there by a wheedling, coat-piercing wind – the harbingers of the inevitable next big storm.
For another, keep in mind that the Rose Bowl was, as it were, It: You would not see another college football game until September. And by “not see” I mean not see in a quite literal way, that is hard now to even imagine, as we loll in the decadent luxury of our present media-saturated age. At that time there were not yet even any VCR tapes, let alone ESPN Classic replays, DVR recordings, or YouTube videos available to break our annual eight-month fast.
Most of all, the telecast of the Rose Bowl unveiled to us, as we huddled in practically Siberian if not Neolithic conditions, what appeared to be an almost mythical world, bathed in a warm golden light, where it was perpetually 77 degrees, and the girls from Beach Boy songs walked along a seashore that could easily be mistaken for paradise itself.
And here I encounter a question that occurs to me now, yet literally never arose for me – or as far as I know anyone else in my family – at the time: Why didn’t we go there, instead of staying here? I suspect that our collective failure to even consider this possibility reflected a kind of inherited Latin fatalism, combined perhaps with the sort of environmentally-inculcated Midwestern stoicism captured well by Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” (Even more puzzling is the fact that I distinctly remember wondering at the time, when UCLA won a recruiting battle with Michigan for a running back from the Detroit area, how schools like Michigan and Ohio State, shivering in the increasingly depressed rust belt, ever won such battles against the sun-kissed glamor offered by the likes of USC and UCLA. Somehow this same puzzlement never extended to my own mindset).
Yet it was that very failure to even contemplate the quintessentially American option of hitting the road, and abandoning quasi-Siberia for the television’s carefully curated vision of happiness, California-style, that gave the experience of watching the Rose Bowl on TV its peculiar melancholic power. There it was before us: the golden country, utterly unlike our own world, and yet still connected to us by the temporary presence of those winged helmets that remained among the most recognizable symbols of our own miserable home, to which, like our football team – which always lost in the Rose Bowl whenever it made it that far – we remained so mysteriously loyal.