The current representative temperature selection method with five cities cannot reflect the sufficient regional climate characteristics. In this paper, the new representative temperature selection method is proposed with the consideration of eight representative cities. The proposed method considered the recent trend of power sales, the climate characteristics and population distribution to improve the accuracy of short-term load forecasting. Case study results for the accuracy of short-term load forecasting are compared for the traditional temperature weights of five cities and the proposed temperature weights of eight cities. The simulation results show that the proposed method provides more accurate results than the traditional method.