hilarious!

[winterbadger]

So, 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...

Comments

[silme.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I've been to Helsinki and Stockholm in January, and I can tell you there aren't many hours of daylight full stop there that time of year -- far less than Massachusetts, that's for sure. I've read that Lerwick (further north than Orkney, I know) gets four hours more daylight than London in the summer and four hours fewer than London in the winter. I'm in southcentral England, and it's pitch black by 4pm in January.

[wolfette]

I'm way down south in Edinburgh and from mid December to mid January the sun doesn't rise till I'm in my work and sets before I finish - and since the sky is usually overcast anyway, you might as well say we get NO daylight. Orkney I know that at midsummer it stays light enough to play golf 24 hours a day (the sun may be down, but the sky is light) - so at midwinter it doesn't surprise me to think that it doesn't get light enough to play golf at all.

[ticktockmary.livejournal.com]

This made me smile, but then I saw the icon and laughed out loud. I love it!

[winterbadger]

I was so glad to find that picture, and I'm sorry I sometimes forget I have it as an potion. :-)

[ban-leodhasach.livejournal.com]

I'm the same as Wolfette, way down in sunny Edinburgh - but I know Lewis is usually dark by 3pm in winter and it's still further south than Orkney. Also the sun never reaches the highest point in the sky in winter either, so on a good day you can expect to be blinded cause it's so low!

[onlyrobin.livejournal.com]

I can tell you from living here just over a year and during the winter months on visits ...

The sun (in the summer) at noon goes right over your head, like it does in the States. In winter (the heart of winter), it comes up over the horizon, gets about halfway up to "noon" status and says, "F-it - I'm going down again..."

It gets up even lower the more north you get.

ANYWAY, yes, around November its really noticable here in Fife and stays that way till around March, when I noticed that it was still daylight when I was leaving work at 5pm.

So Orkney will probably start having a setting sun around 2ish, maybe a bit earlier, and will be fully dark around 2:30 to 3pm (sunsets don't last long in the winter) and the sun will probably start to come up around 9ish and have full light (on a clear day) around 10ish.

Good news is that the summer days are fantastic and will be longer than even we get down here. We were there in April and the sun didn't go down till well after 10pm THEN and it get goes down even later in June (around the 21st are the longest days).

Kind of vague I know, but its the best I can do! Good luck!