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ZERO where I live (40 miles from the coast) but the immediate coast gets plenty of completely overcast days due to the marine layer. Ours always burns off by 11AM at the latest. Once or twice a summer, we may get a day with high clouds due to monsoons but there are still some sunny breaks.
Monsoons in California?
This word seems to get used a bit in reference to the US. What's that all about?
They do happen, but they are rather rare. Though I think we have more summer overcast days than Paris, London and Leeds, to mention a few. Rainy days can be totally overcast, and the next day may be very cloudy as well. We had 11 days this summer with no or very little sunshine. On the other hand we may have completely clear skies for several days in a row, this summer we had 3 periods with at least 48h consecutive hours without any cloud cover at all. I think this is rather rare for the places mentioned earlier. Getting the max possible sunshine during a single day is quite common as well.
We get May Gray and June Gloom here occasionally when there are a string of days with little or no sun due to an onshore marine layer near the beaches. Not so common later in the summer for it to last all day.
They don't happen much, though I don't have any statistics, so I'm speaking from my memory.
Most cloudy days have a break somewhere. And it's unusual to have a day with absolutely no cloud cover, a cloud will usually sneak in there somewhere in the day. Completely cloudy or clear days are more common outside of summer, though summer has the highest sunshine percent. November probably has the most completely cloudy days, it's the cloudiest month in terms of percentage.
They do happen, but they are rather rare. Though I think we have more summer overcast days than Paris, London and Leeds, to mention a few. Rainy days can be totally overcast, and the next day may be very cloudy as well. We had 11 days this summer with no or very little sunshine. On the other hand we may have completely clear skies for several days in a row, this summer we had 3 periods with at least 48h consecutive hours without any cloud cover at all. I think this is rather rare for the places mentioned earlier. Getting the max possible sunshine during a single day is quite common as well.
Yeah, getting completely sunny days is a hard task here. On our sunniest days, cloud will almost always bubble up around midday, and sometimes will obscure the sun for an hour or two before clearing later in the afternoon. For completely sunny/cloudless days here, your best bet is outside summer, when the sun is weaker so lass surface-based heating occurs. Today was one of our sunniest days of the year in percentage terms, with completely unbroken sunshine for 10 hours, and I recall a few days in February where the sun shone from dawn to dusk without any cloud covering it at any point. There was probably about one day like that in July.
^^ Same here, they're unusual. We had 2 sunless days last summer. Unlike during the cool season, there's almost always a break in the cloud cover at some point in the day.
Though very cloudy days (say 2 hours or less) are relatively common. We had 8 of them last summer.
The previous summer has 1 sunless day, but 15 below 2 hours. Granted, that was a very cloudy summer.
This word seems to get used a bit in reference to the US. What's that all about?
The SW US gets a monsoon in summer, particularly New Mexico and Arizona. I guess maybe the part of CA near AZ gets some of the thunderstorms. Areas of AZ and NM get as many tstorms as places in the Upper US South, and certinaly more than the NE US.
If you look at the map below, you can clearly see the area in AZ and NM with the 50 tstorms annually. That is the center of the US monsoon area. Not only tstorms, but dewpoints and humidity also increase in summer to uncomfortable levels at times.
Looks like the Salton Sea area of CA gets the most in CA, probably from the effects of the monsoon.
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