122 to 49: AZ wins!

The horrible summer temperatures are starting to ease here in AZ, and going outside is no longer feels like you're a Big Mac under a heat lamp. Before I moved here, I imagined AZ as a year round death valley, with withering temperatures and never any rain.

Well, it turns out that it does rain, and hard. And it turns out that the temperatures here are wonderful most of the time. Let me prove it to you.

We moved here from a cooler climate, where there really isn't the baking heat in the summer. There is, however, a long horrible freezing winter. Which climate is "better", you ask? Lets look at that question.

How do you measure "goodness" of climate? There are a lot of factors: wind, storms, snow, rain, temperature, humidity, and so forth.

Because AZ gets such a bad rap for the heat, let me focus purely on temperature. My ideal temperature range is 65-85 degrees Fahrenheit. Colder or hotter than that is less than ideal. I like it warm during the day and cool at night. (This corresponds well to UT in July and August, and AZ in May and October. It also corresponds to Maui pretty much all year.) You may have a different "ideal" range, but let's use my range for the purposes of this discussion. For me, anything over 100 degrees, or under 32 degrees is unacceptable and very uncomfortable. This is the "horrible" range. These ranges will form boundaries for grading the temperatures in UT and AZ.

Using the magic of the internet, I was able to find the average high and low temperatures for both where I live in AZ and where I used to live in UT. These numbers are the average highs and lows for the last 20 or so years, so any individual year will vary from these numbers.

In Chart 1, you can see that the blue colored lines are the average monthly high and low temperatures for UT. The red colored lines are the average monthly high and low temperatures for AZ. The ideal temperature range is shown in green, and the horrible temperature range are shown in red. An interesting observation about the two: The difference between the average high temperatures is about 30 degrees in the winter and about 10 degrees in the summer. In other words, UT is much colder than AZ in the winter, and almost as hot in the summer months. Interesting.

Now, to measure the "goodness' of the temperatures. I decided that any time the average temperature range for a state moves into the ideal range, it will earn points for how much of the range is covered. The parts of the monthly temps that are outside the ideal range get no points. When the monthly temps enter the horrible range they get negative points. The points received equal the area of the temperature range within the ideal or horrible ranges. The most points that a month can earn is 20, as the ideal range covers 20 degrees. This means that the best possible yearly score that could be given to an area is 240.

Some examples, if the average monthly temperature range is 65-85 degrees, it matches exactly to the ideal range, and will receive a full 20 points for that month. If the temp range was 45-75, it covers 10 degrees of the ideal range, and would only receive 10 of the possible 20 points. If the range was 90-100, it would receive 0 points for that month. If the range was 100-110, it covers 10 degrees of the horrible range and would be given a score of -10. Note that a monthly temp range could include part of the ideal range and part of the horrible range.

Chart 2 shows the temperature goodness points earned by the two states for each month. Note that AZ gets pushed down hard for high temps in the summer, but UT gets creamed in the winter. This is because even in the heat of summer, the average lows in AZ still touch the ideal range. In the winter in UT, the entire average temp range is below the ideal range, and often enters the horrible range.

So, what's the final score? AZ gets 122 weather goodness points, and UT gets a meager 49. This just means that most of the time the temperatures in AZ are closer to my ideal than UT.

For comparison's sake I added Maui and Washington. (Is is really that cold in WA? I had no idea.) Maui scored an amazing 204, and WA a pathetic 30. "That's not really fair to WA", you say. "It's cooler there and people like it cool." OK, let's check that. Let's suppose that our ideal temps are cooler say 55-75 degrees. You'd need to be a polar bear to like it colder than that. I'll even lower the high "horrible" range to 95 to hurt Arizona's score (although 95 in AZ feels pretty nice).

Chart 4 shows those results. The results? Even with those preferred temperature ranges, AZ wins with 107, HI is second with 103, WA achieves an 89, and UT falls to last with 74. One sign that this "ideal" temperature range is wrong? Any test that says that Maui doesn't have the best weather is messed up. Maui is perfect.

All I'm trying to say with this post is that AZ has really wonderful weather most of the year. Don't be hatin' just cuz you don't understand.