About AverageClimate
AverageClimate.com answers a simple question with official data: what is the weather in a city actually like, month by month, in a typical year? We publish climate profiles for 114 U.S. cities — average high and low temperatures, rainfall, and snowfall for every month — built entirely from the federal government's climate normals, and written for the two decisions climate data serves best: when to visit a place, and whether to live there.
Our Editorial Team
The AverageClimate Editorial Team is a small group of data editors and writers who work with public climate records the way financial editors work with public statistics: we obtain the authoritative dataset, verify it, and present it in plain language with the source named on every page. We do not operate weather stations, we do not issue forecasts, and we never present modeled or scraped weather data as official figures. When readers write in with corrections, a member of the team checks the claim against the underlying NOAA record before anything changes.
How we source and check our numbers
Every temperature, precipitation, and snowfall figure on this site comes from one dataset: the 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals, published by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Normals are 30-year averages computed by NCEI from quality-controlled station records; they are the standard reference the National Weather Service uses to describe a place's climate. We download the monthly normals files directly from NCEI's data service (ncei.noaa.gov) — no intermediary datasets, no third-party weather sites.
For each city we use one representative station, normally the city's principal airport or National Weather Service station, and we print the station's full official name and NCEI identifier on the city page so any reader can trace the numbers back to the source file. Before publication, we cross-checked our figures for all 114 stations against NCEI's separately published annual and seasonal normals for the same stations — the annual mean temperature, total precipitation, and total snowfall implied by our monthly tables had to match NCEI's annual values — and spot-checked monthly values against published station normals tables. If a figure could not be verified, it did not run.
Two honest limitations follow from using a single official source. First, a station describes its own location: an airport on the edge of a city may run a few degrees cooler at night than a downtown neighborhood, and mountain cities can vary sharply by elevation. Second, where NOAA does not publish a monthly snowfall normal for a station — true for a handful of our warm-weather and Pacific Northwest stations — the snow column on that city's page shows a dash rather than a borrowed or estimated number. We would rather show a gap than invent a figure.
How to read a city page
Start with the table: it is the whole dataset for that city, with each temperature cell shaded from blue (below freezing) through amber to rose (hot) so the shape of the year is visible at a glance. The season-by-season sections translate the table into words; the best-months section ranks all twelve months with a transparent comfort score built only from the normals (mild mean temperatures rewarded, heavy precipitation and snow penalized); and the planning notes pull out the facts — freeze months, 90-degree months, day-to-night temperature swings — that shape daily life and travel in that city.
Corrections and updates
NOAA revises its normals on a ten-year cycle, and station records are occasionally corrected between releases. We re-verify our tables against NCEI's files and update pages when the source data changes. If you spot a figure that does not match the official normals for the station named on the page, please tell us through the contact page — include the city and the value you believe is wrong, and we will check it against the source file and correct the page if you are right.