Sorry if this is too basic a question, or the wrong place to post.
I am planning a road trip, and I'm trying to optimize the date I leave based on historically average weather for all the states I'll be visiting. I have four qualifiers for "bad weather":
- Rain
- Snow
- Temp over 90F
- Temp below 32F
I've downloaded data from the NOAA, processed a fair bit, and now I arrive at my statistics problem.
Here's what the data looks like for Zion National Park in Utah. The first item in each list is the number of days in January with that kind of bad weather, then February and so on. So March in Zion has 5 rainy days.
rainDays: [ 4.4, 5, 5, 3.3, 2.1, 1, 2.8, 3.6, 2.2, 3, 3.3, 3.8 ],
snowDays: [ 0.6, 0.5, 0.4, 0.1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.3, 0.6 ],
hotDays: [ 0, 0, 0, 1, 9.9, 24.3, 29.9, 28.8, 18.4, 3.3, 0, 0 ],
coldDays: [ 0, 0.2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.2 ]
The statistics question is: What are the overall odds of a bad weather day for each month?
My first approach, which seemed obviously wrong, was just to add up the categories. January has 4.4 rain days and 0.6, so on average it has 5 days of bad weather. The trouble became obvious in July, where this method yields 32.7 bad days on average. It can rain while also being hot.
My second idea is to divide each number by the number of days in the month to get odds instead of total, then... multiply? So a day in July has a 2.8/31 chance of rain and a 29.9/31 chance of being too hot. That's 83.72/961, which is far too small to be the number of bad days, so maybe that's the odds of those hot and rainy days? So maybe I should take 32.7 and subtract 83.72/961 * 31, to remove the double-counted bad days? That leaves right around 30, which seems like a reasonable number, but at this point I've made too many guesses as to how this works to be confident.
If anyone can give me an idea of how to do this, it would be greatly appreciated!
One final note: I do realize that I'm ignoring the fact that, say, snow days and cold days are likely to overlap. I'm okay with this.