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What climates have cloudy days with little rain? I know Lima, Peru is one of these, so I guess cloudy desert or dry climates can occur.
What are the processes that make clouds common but no rain? I guess you can have lots of coastal fog but no rain. San Francisco is known for its fog but actually has lots of sunshine hours, unlike the UK.
The winters in Arica and Iquique in Chile are rather cloudy despite getting virtually no rainfall at all.
I'm aware that their Wikipedia sunshine data is rigged, but for very dry places (getting no more than 3mm of rain in a year) they are rather relatively cloudy. Otherwise the sunshine would've been as high as 3,800-4,000 (i.e, Aswan, Luxor).
Neumayer Station, Antarctica has a lot of these (in this case, the precipitation would be snow). I think it's because the precipitation doesn't actually fall in that place, but in another place.
The winters in Arica and Iquique in Chile are rather cloudy despite getting virtually no rainfall at all.
I'm aware that their Wikipedia sunshine data is rigged, but for very dry places (getting no more than 3mm of rain in a year) they are rather relatively cloudy. Otherwise the sunshine would've been as high as 3,800-4,000 (i.e, Aswan, Luxor).
Iquique's minimum month gets 161 hours, but Antofagasta's least of 205 in June is a good tally and Calama as previously posted, averages about 297 in June. Calama does have some hilly territory in the mid-distance, which would reduce available daylight slightly, making its figures even more impressive.
What climates have cloudy days with little rain? I know Lima, Peru is one of these, so I guess cloudy desert or dry climates can occur.
What are the processes that make clouds common but no rain? I guess you can have lots of coastal fog but no rain. San Francisco is known for its fog but actually has lots of sunshine hours, unlike the UK.
Coastal Southern California gets May Grey/June Gloom, particularly the San Diego area. Obviously it's not a year-round thing hence the name, but this explains the reasons why:
As for other areas, here is an excerpt from the article:
Quote:
The condition is prevalent in many parts of the world where an offshore marine layer of stratus or stratocumulus clouds is common, such as the western coasts of continents—particularly off Peru, Namibia, Western Australia, atlantic Sahara and Northern California, particularly San Francisco. Such cloud systems are persistent year-round off the coast; in certain seasons they move ashore and create the cloudy, cool effect on land.[8] These places typically are located in a Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classificationCsa), but the effect occurs in other climate zones as well, where conditions are favorable. San Francisco has fog throughout much of the year, common through some of Northern California. Central California also has areas with cooler weather as the result of the fog through much of the year.
Yeah, some coastal desert locations such as the surronding cities near the Atacama desert have a cloudy but a extremely dry climate because of the Humboldt Current, which is a cool, wet marine current that come from the South Pole where it's extremely cold and that goes along the west coast of the South America. This current is the consequence of the upwelling effect and considerably cools off and dries out the hot, tropical climate but is responsible of a much cloudier climate by forming lots of low clouds and fog, especially the camanchaca. The Atacama desert, itself, doesn't have this abundant cloud cover because the Andes Mountains and the other minor mountains ranges block the clouds and the fog along the coast. The other driest places on the world, which are essentially located in the Sahara desert (Egypt, Sudan, Libya) have an extremely low, a nearly non-existent cloud cover, with a sunshine duration between 3,700 hours and which can even go over 4,000 hours annually.
Seems also possible in places with a minor rain shadow. Mountains catch most of the rain, but the clouds still reach further. In the winter, a place like Spokane is almost as cloudy as Seattle but a lot drier:
I remember the poster from Eugene, OR had a cloudy but rather dry winter month. Valley cloud trapped. Some parts of British Columbia get a similar pattern.
We can be cloudy for three weeks straight (or longer) during the months of October through January. I think December is the worse with it only being sunny 17% of the time. Did I tell you that we are semi-arid, so we don't get rain very often? When the rain or snow does come, it tends to clear out the valley cloud. When we get those cloudy stretches they are almost always dry spells.
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