Boston Has the Eighth Most Unpredictable Weather in America

Photo courtesy Adrian Dalca

An oft quoted aphorism on any of the countless college tours bopping around town is that if you don’t like the weather in Boston, “wait five minutes.” This may come as some surprise to you, but neither the one-liner nor the atmospheric fickleness is all that unique to the Hub.

FiveThirtyEight set out to determine which U.S. city can lay claim to the dubious distinction of the most unpredictable weather in America, and Boston cracked the top 10. Nate Silver and Reuben Fischer-Baum took 120 American cities, one for every National Weather Service forecast office, and compared them across 10 weather statistics, cobbled together into an overall measure of unpredictability—that is, how much the weather deviates from long-term trends.

Though oceans and lakes help make weather a little more predictable, Boston was one of the more notable exceptions on the East Coast, thanks to its highly varied wind patterns and humidity levels, good for No. 8 on FiveThirtyEight’s list.

Kansas City, Missouri took the No. 1 spot, followed by Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Birmingham, Boston, Milwaukee, and Dallas. Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, on the other hand, had some of the most predictable weather in the country.

You can check out FiveThirtyEight’s full report here.