<p>I am interested in which year has the best representation of average weather across a large area, the contiguous USA. This is challenging since what was average in the Midwest might have been unusual in the Southeast at that time. Still I think there is a year that is closest to 'normal' for the largest portion of the USA compared to other years.</p>
<p>Am I wrong to think one year could represent an average for such a large area? If needing to pick a year most representative across the contiguous USA, how would one identify the best year, say from 1990-2020? Is there an easy place to lookup this kind of climate information, or what calculations would need to be done?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-12-18T00:44:06.103Z
https://phys.org/news/2015-02-years-above-average-temperatures-climate.html has a good description on using the global average for 1901-2000 to determine every month in the last 30 year (now 35 years) was warmer than that average. Your first step is determining what you want to use for a comparative average.
Christopher Klaus
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-12-23T12:09:24.903Z
A year in which every place in the US experienced average weather every day would be an extremely abnormal year.
David Hammen
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-12-23T19:07:16.010Z
@DavidHammen The representative average year might not be normal, but it would be helpful to have a single year to compare different places in the U.S. against. Otherwise, for most years that are not a good representative of the broad U.S. having average weather, an analysis in one place may be assessing conditions in a particularly dry or hot year whereas the same year in another place may have represented that places average. Therefore I'm looking for a year best representing average conditions across the U.S. Part of the challenge is how to begin identifying avg for such a large area.
cr0
<meteorology><climate><united-states>
Is there an average year of weather across the United States?
cr0
# Is there an average year of weather across the United States?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-12-17)

I am interested in which year has the best representation of average weather across a large area, the contiguous USA. This is challenging since what was average in the Midwest might have been unusual in the Southeast at that time. Still I think there is a year that is closest to 'normal' for the largest portion of the USA compared to other years.

Am I wrong to think one year could represent an average for such a large area? If needing to pick a year most representative across the contiguous USA, how would one identify the best year, say from 1990-2020? Is there an easy place to lookup this kind of climate information, or what calculations would need to be done?

**Tags:** meteorology, climate, united-states

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: https://phys.org/news/2015-02-years-above-average-temperatures-climate.html has a good description on using the global average for 1901-2000 to determine every month in the last 30 year (now 35 years) was warmer than that average. Your first step is determining what you want to use for a comparative average.  
> **username_2**: A year in which every place in the US experienced average weather every day would be an extremely abnormal year.  
> **username_0**: @username_2 The representative average year might not be normal, but it would be helpful to have a single year to compare different places in the U.S. against. Otherwise, for most years that are not a good representative of the broad U.S. having average weather, an analysis in one place may be assessing conditions in a particularly dry or hot year whereas the same year in another place may have represented that places average. Therefore I'm looking for a year best representing average conditions across the U.S. Part of the challenge is how to begin identifying avg for such a large area.  

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## 0 answers

