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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?

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    $\begingroup$ phys.org/news/… 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. $\endgroup$ – Christopher Klaus Dec 18 '20 at 0:44
  • $\begingroup$ A year in which every place in the US experienced average weather every day would be an extremely abnormal year. $\endgroup$ – David Hammen Dec 23 '20 at 12:09
  • $\begingroup$ @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. $\endgroup$ – cr0 Dec 23 '20 at 19:07

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