Sales of air conditioners in the US are largely dependent on weather. I know that sounds obvious but what you may not know is that there is government tracked metric that shows how hot one summer was relative to past summers. The US Air Conditioning industry uses this metric to determine how many sales were due to hot weather and how many might have been due to other factors.
The national Cooling Degree Days (CDD) metric is based on a population-weighted, national average of all regions compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This metric tends to correlate well with how much air conditioning is being used as the season goes on.
For example, from 2010 to 2013, the CDD ranged from 250 to 274 degree cooling days above normal when the U.S. saw some of its hottest summers since the mid-1980’s. In comparison, 2009 was very cool, at only 33 cooling degree days. In 1997, we were 119 cooling degree days below normal, and in 1992, we were down to an amazing 177 cooling degree days below normal.
