Where do people find the weather hardest to predict?

In a previous blog post I showed where the weather deviated the most from the monthly average. In this blog I am going to combine those fields to make a map of where I think a local would find the weather hard to predict.

What do I mean by predicting the weather? I am talking about success at planning a picnic for two weeks’ time. I do not mean looking out at the sky and deciding if you should bring an umbrella.

You could think that more extreme events should be weighted much more heavily than less extreme. A hurricane that made landfall unexpectedly is going to stick in your mind more than that cold spell in July. I have ignored this.

I have also neglected the non-seasonal dynamics that happen in the tropics. For example, there are tropical oscillation (such as the QBO) that mean there are regular dry and wet periods that are more predictable for a person than my analysis would suggest. That said, let’s see what kind of map we create!

I subjectively decided to weight rain twice as much as temperature and wind speed 5 times less than temperature. Which countries, by my estimation at least, have the most and least predictable weather?

2021 Top 10 countries with the most predictable weather:

10: Eritrea
9: Bahamas
8: Dominican Republic
7: Djibouti
6: Qatar
5: Haiti
4: Somalia
3: Jamaica
2: Puerto Rico
1: Saint Lucia

And now, what we have all been waiting for:

2021 Top 10 countries with the least predictable weather:

10: New Zealand
9: Mongolia
8: China
7: Greenland
6: Kazakhstan
5: United States
4: Indonesia
3: Canada
2: Russia
1: Colombia

If Antarctica had been ranked, it would be 6th.

These maps were generated in Python using ERA5 data from Copernicus. The data had a quarter degree resolution.

This post was inspired by an interesting article that used US weather station data to try and answer what state had the most capricious weather. I decided to make the global version.

Muñoz Sabater, J., (2019): ERA5-Land hourly data from 1981 to present. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store (CDS).