![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hilarious!
Oct. 8th, 2009 12:36 pmSo, I was thinking again about taking a trip to Orkney, over the winter so I would get an idea of what living there in January would be like.
So, I'm looking at the climate summaries (most of which seem to be all cribbed off some central text, as they are word for word identical), and they tell me that in December the Orkney Islands get an average of 0.8 hours of daylight, and an average of 3.3 per year.
I'm thinking, "I know it's far north, but that sounds ridiculous. Less than an hour of light every day? That would make cycling [one of the things I'd been thinking of doing extensively] rather dangerous." So I start looking for met records of sunrise and sunset. And sure enough, at the darkest of winter, the area still has six hours of daylight.
At which point I realised that the climate stats were being very, VERY literal and only counting hours of FULL sunlight. Heh. I can't imagine that by that measure Western Mass. gets more than an hour or two of daylight per day over the winter...
So, I'm looking at the climate summaries (most of which seem to be all cribbed off some central text, as they are word for word identical), and they tell me that in December the Orkney Islands get an average of 0.8 hours of daylight, and an average of 3.3 per year.
I'm thinking, "I know it's far north, but that sounds ridiculous. Less than an hour of light every day? That would make cycling [one of the things I'd been thinking of doing extensively] rather dangerous." So I start looking for met records of sunrise and sunset. And sure enough, at the darkest of winter, the area still has six hours of daylight.
At which point I realised that the climate stats were being very, VERY literal and only counting hours of FULL sunlight. Heh. I can't imagine that by that measure Western Mass. gets more than an hour or two of daylight per day over the winter...
