Tired of experiencing cold and soggy weather conditions while travel around the United States, designer and software engineer, Kelly Norton, decided to use data analysis in order to find where the beautiful weather was hiding. Using NOAA Global Summary of the Day data archive , he created a data visualizations tool illustrating The Pleasant Places to Live . Defining “pleasant” as areas with temperatures between 45°F and 85°F with little to no snow or rain, Norton literally mapped out the past 23 years of the weather in the U. S.

Data analytics, the process of examining raw data to find conclusions, were used to decipher the data into an interactive identifying the five most pleasant and five least pleasant places in the country. Incorporating cities in a series of circles, the reader can hover over any circle to find the location identified, the number of pleasant days per year, and in which months those days fell.  Users may also enter a zip code to find a location.

Southern California swept the five most pleasant places with Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, Simi Valley, and San Francisco respectively. The least pleasant places are more scatter, located in Montana (twice), Nevada, Wyoming and California.