Weather

When disc golfers argue about which city is better for disc golfers, one factor that comes up is weather.  Southerners contend that Winter months in Northern climates shouldn't count, while Northerners counter that it's too gosh-darn hot to play most of the year in the South.

I believe there is some truth to both claims.    So, I looked for a way to quantify them.

I came across DegreeDays.net, which can compute Heating and Cooling degree days for just about any location.  Heating and Cooling degree days are usually used for computing energy needs for buildings.  However, I just used them as a measure of how cold and hot it gets for how long.

I contacted two disc golf stores at opposite ends of the climate: Fairway Flyerz in Minnesota and Clearwater Disc Golf Store in Florida.  Both provided information about disc golf activity by month.

I related the disc golf activity to the heating degree days (HDD) and cooling degree days (CDD).  I found that disc golf activity goes down in proportion to both HDD and CDD.   

Each degree-day of "too cold" does far less to reduce disc golf activity than each degree-day of "too hot".  ("You can always put more clothes on, but you can only take off everything.")  But, the northern cities have a lot more cold than southern cities have hot.

The actual formula is:

Disc Golf Activity = (1 – HDD/1841)*(1-CDD/700). 

Where HDD is the five-year average number of 72-degree-baseline Heating Degree Days for a particular month and CDD is the five-year average number of 72-degree-baseline Cooling Degree Days for a particular month.

The result will be a number between zero and one for each month.  Add the Disc Golf Activity for all months to find how many "good" months of disc golf a place has.   Use this to deflate the estimates of numbers of disc golfers.  Multiply Service Level by Good Months/12.

The charts above show the results for a few cities.