Posted on February 18, 2016
When it comes to hatred, I'm against it!
But this silly “holiday” isn't really about hatred. People who are suffering in bitterly cold weather right about now might love Florida, might long to live in Florida (or at least spend a week there, to thaw out), might even envy Florida with a bitterness equal to their own bitter weather in, say, Minnesota or Montana...
And why is this? Because Florida is the warmest state in the U.S.!
Of course, we are talking about state-wide average temperatures. Florida and many other southern states have made the top-10 list of warmest states. And did you already guess that Hawaii is on the list, as well?
But the tropical islands of Hawaii are not #1 on the list! Instead, the warmest state, talking average temperatures over the course of the entire year, is Florida!
So then you get weather maps that look like this:
And all the people “enjoying” high temperatures of 1 degree...or maybe even minus 16 degrees!...have to see warm, cozy Florida down there at the bottom of their weather map screens...day in and day out!
What winter?
As I sit writing this post, here in Southern California—deep into February, still very much in winter—I thought about the fact that today we enjoyed a high of 90 degrees, and even now at 8:00 p.m., it is 73 degrees. Warm days and super nice evenings—and it's been this way all week. So I got to wondering where California is on the top-10 list of warmest states.
And I discovered that California didn't make the top 10!
Well, no duh! California is a really large state. And we have high snowy mountains and a desert that is THE HOTTEST place in the U.S., in the summer, and we have foggy Northern California coasts as well as sunny So Cal...So naturally the average temperatures are not going to be as high as a smaller state like Hawaii.
It turns out that California is #8 warmest U.S. state in the winter, but not in the top-10 in either the summer or in the year-round list. And that's one reason that I love Southern California!
Here's the complete list of the warmest states:
| Rank | Year | Winter | Summer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | Hawaii | Louisiana |
| 2 | Hawaii | Florida | Texas |
| 3 | Louisiana | Louisiana | Florida |
| 4 | Texas | Texas | Oklahoma |
| 5 | Georgia | Georgia | Mississippi |
| 6 | Mississippi | Mississippi | Arkansas |
| 7 | Alabama | Alabama | Georgia |
| 8 | South Carolina | California | Alabama |
| 9 | Arkansas | South Carolina | South Carolina |
| 10 | Arizona | Arizona | Arizona |
And this is what Southern California often looks like, even in the winter:
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