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Only when Helsinki loses practically every single battle it has ever been in (when it should win), and only wins against truly awful climates like La Paz.
Ditto for London. Seems London can't even get a better grading result than the frigid Houghton, Michigan, with only 3 A's and 6 B's compared to 11 each for Houghton.
Come on, I know there are way more cold lovers on here than the ones who have currently voted. Have they all gone into hiding?
Ditto for London. Seems London can't even get a better grading result than the frigid Houghton, Michigan.
But London does lose when it should be an easy victory. The only 'surprise' was when it beat Warsaw. Usually it will only win against a climate with absolutely no redeeming features at all (La Paz).
I think London would lose against McMurdo with the people in this forum!
I haven't found their conversions, but I recall someone saying that the electronic readings are about 15% higher.
Something doesn't seem quite right with this either. Philly averages 2496 using Foster-Foster. It has been shown to record sun hours wtih 85W on days with high thin clouds or haze. So you would lower our number to around 2200, and raise Portsmouth to around 2200. That just does not seem realisitic.
But London does lose when it should be an easy victory. The only 'surprise' was when it beat Warsaw. Usually it will only win against a climate with absolutely no redeeming features at all (La Paz).
The main reason I barley vote for London is the sunshine hours (aside from generally disliking Cfb). There are better climates in the UK imo.
You also have Chicago which used to use a sunshine recorder that has a burn threshold of 260W/m2, and averaged 2600 hours of sun.
RWood said he thought Chicago barely had 2100 hours when he spent a year there.
Well, Chicago averages slightly more than we do. So maybe Chicago and Philly and for that matter all of the eastern US is less sunny than Portsmouth. I'd like to know where those sun hours for Portsmouth came from anyway, cause the Met Office site lists 1792 hours (Thorney Island) not the 1919 from Wiki.
The Wiki data claims "Regional Mapped Climate Averages". It's a map that lists 1750 to 1900 for the sunniest parts. It doesn't even list 1919 hours. Thorney Island shows the exact same color as Portsmouth, yet the actual sunshine data there is 1792 hours. I found on the Met Office website a reference to the document that is used to convert the sunshine hours. This from their website:
The Met Office uses two types of sunshine recorder. How does this affect the sunshine grids? The majority of the stations in the Met Office network that record sunshine duration use a Campbell-Stokes recorder. However, a significant proportion of the stations that report in real time now use a Kipp & Zonen sunshine sensor (the first such sensors were installed in 2000). The characteristics of the two instruments are not identical and therefore some adjustment of the observations to a common standard is required. Currently, Kipp & Zonen monthly totals are adjusted to Campbell-Stokes equivalent values prior to generating the sunshine grids. The correction methodology is described in a paper by A. Kerr and R. Tabony: 'Comparison of sunshine recorded by Campbell-Stokes and automatic sensors' (Weather, April 2004, vol. 59,90-95), but additional overlapped data was used by M. Perry in 2007 to produce improved monthly adjustment factors (study to be published).
I found that report by Kerr and Tabony that describes the methodology for converting sunshine hours. See link below. In the UK the CS machines overestimate sunshine anywhere from 7% (winter) to 20% (summer). The actual conversion would take a 50% possible for July recorded by an auto sensor and convert it to 57% CS using the quadratic equations listed in the paper. So it seems they are actually keeping your CS numbers inflated compared to the WMO standard, not the other way round.
Summary from the report:
The relationship between monthly sunshine totals obtained from CS and AUTO instruments was examined based on 16 stations data. The CS recorder overestimates the sunshine due to a spreading of the burn on the card. This occurs mostly when cloud cover is broken and the sun is high in the sky.
A simple linear regression technique shows that the CS recorder overestimates the sunshine by about 20% in summer and 7% in winter. This seasonal variation is attributed mainly to the influence of solar elevation....
Oh no, Helsinki's losing. Can I now whine that people don't even look at the averages and votes for London?
How would you know if they did or didn't? London's climate is similar to Seattle and I don't like Seattle's winters or springs. Helsinki doesn't have much to like imo but I prefer warmer climates and don't understand why some people prefer to suffer through cold snowy winters with little sun. I travel a lot and try to avoid too many months in the no winter sun PNW.
Why does everywhere else in Europe show an increase in sunshine, when switching from CS to electronic? Paris and Berlin now have about 100-200 hours more than London, when they used to have the same or less. Warsaw used to record less sun than London but now records crazy numbers.
London just has a very dull climate....few thunderstorms, not much snow, not much cold OR heat and the temps only vary from about a 45 F average high in winter to about 73 F in Summer....I get more variation here in Tallahassee lol. If it makes you feel any better I would vote for London if it was pitted against the likes of Barranquilla or San Juan
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