Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Worst climate is entirely subjective so please back up your assertions with reasoning, and let's arbitrarily define a large city as 1,000,000+
For me two contenders stand out.
1. Mecca: Daily mean temperature of over 30°C, average summer highs approaching 43°C, almost no rainfall, and insane levels of sunshine make this city, for me, by far the worst large city climate on Earth.
alternatively...
2. Glasgow: This city fails to reach an average high of 20°C even in midsummer and sees very high levels of precipitation and extreme cloud cover. Winters are gloomy and cold but barely ever get cold enough for significant snowfall. It seems no other large city come close to this combination of terrible weather factors.
In addition to the two you mentioned, I'd go with Singapore. I really hate that sort of climate. It's on the equator and it's understandably hot and humid, yes, but it's also way too cloudy for its latitude. Like, really?
There are a lot of areas in the tropics that get little precipitation, are either savanna or semiarid, and somehow manage to have very high humidity. Since Juba doesn't have over a million people, I would say that Mandalay looks dreadful. It is in the semiarid central basin of Myanmar, and most months have over 70% humidity. In the summer, average highs range between 34 and 38 C, and even winter highs are around 30C. In wetter rainforest climates, I am able to begrudgingly tolerate the heat and humidity due to my love for thunderstorms.
On the other end of the spectrum, Shenyang seems bad. I don't like overly continental climates. Northern China seems like it would have sticky, hellish summers and bitter, severe winters without the joy of any large accumulations of snow due to the East Asian Monsoon. Despite the entire US east of the Great Plains receiving more annual precipitation than Shenyang, Shenyang is wet for a city in Manchuria. I think the deserts of Western China are very cool, and I even sometimes find semiarid steppes intriguing, but for some reason those climates that are dry but not quite dry enough to be below the aridity threshold annoy me.
In addition to the two you mentioned, I'd go with Singapore. I really hate that sort of climate. It's on the equator and it's understandably hot and humid, yes, but it's also way too cloudy for its latitude. Like, really?
I haven't been to Singapore but I have been to Kuala Lumpur and Kuching and believe me, I was grateful for any cloud cover from the equatorial sun and any shade. The equatorial sun is so powerful it's nothing like mid or high latitude locations.
Harbin
Shenyang
Qiqihar
Beijing
Hohhot
Urumqi
Pyongyang
Sapporo
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Nizhniy Novgorod
Novosibirsk
Yekaterinburg
Krasnoyarsk
Omsk
Almaty
Ulaanbaatar
Helsinki
Oslo
Kyiv
Minsk
Toronto
Montreal
Ottawa
Calgary
Edmonton
Minneapolis
Chicago
Detroit
Cleveland
Buffalo
Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Ahvaz are objectively worse than any Asian metro in the humid (i.e. non-arid) tropics.
Mandalay doesn't seem to have anomalously high wet-season dewpoints the way Hanoi, Dhaka, Kolkata, and various locales along the lower Indus River do.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.