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Meteorological autumn had 608.2 hours of sunshine in Chicago (not including today)....
2013:
Spring: 561.9
Autumn: 608.2
Summer: 819.7
Now I just have to figure out the rest of the year...
Going to be a far cry from 2012's total of about 2800 hours. Then again 2012 was one of Chicago's sunniest years
1895 was the sunniest year with 2937 hours of sunshine
Quote:
Dear Brian,
We posed your question to Chicago's sunshine guru Frank Wachowski who told us that while 2012 has been exceptionally sunny, it will fall short of being the city's sunniest year. The current sunshine champ is 1895 which logged an impressive 66 percent of its possible sunshine followed by runner-up 1988 with 65 percent. Through the end of November, 2012 averaged 64 percent of possible sunshine and it would take an impossibly sunny December with nearly 100 percent of the possible sunshine to break the record. With our current string of five sunless days, December's percent of possible sunshine has dropped to a dreary 37 percent, below the month's normal of 41 percent.
November was about 20% above average in my area, so I haven't noticed the gloom yet at all. It seems we are overdue a month with a really low sunshine total though: the averages for Bradford are 34 hours for December and 42 for January, so not that remarkable either way, but looking at the archives it's interesting how a couple of decades ago really low sun totals used to come fairly thick and fast, but then they just stopped.
December 1989 - 14.0 hours
December 1991 - 14.1 hours
December 1992 - 7.2 hours
January 1993 - 17.5 hours
December 1993 - 17.7 hours
January 1996 - 10.3 hours
Bradford only had 23.1 hours in January 2013, but that's the only sub-25 in all that time.
Last month was brutal for sunshine (which is largely why we were over a degree colder than average during the day while managing to be 0.2 degrees warmer than average at night). I record solar radiation at my place, so I'm converting this data into hours of sunshine. Here are my totals so far this year:
Jan = 44.9
Feb = 77.6
Mar = 179.3
Apr = 153.3
May = 229.1
Jun = 193
Jul = 331.4
Aug = 194.8
Sep = 158.2
Oct = 114.8 Nov = 47.2
Number of days each month without any sunshine:
Jan = 10
Feb = 4
Mar = 4
Apr = 7
May = 3
Jun = 4
Jul = 1
Aug = 1
Sep = 5
Oct = 7 Nov = 14
1.5 hours to the 3rd. Don't believe we had any gold today.
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