Thanks to a tip from Redfin’s Seattle Twitter feed, I’ve been looking at the data for “Top 101 cities with the lowest maximum monthly sunshine amount.” Seattle is fourth, after…wait for it…Bellingham, Everett, and Shoreline. (Something called “East Seattle” is fifth.) Washington state manages 13 of the top 14 placements, in all.
I’m not sure what units of sunshine are being measured, but it seems to correlate well with their statistics for cloudy days, so perhaps it is zero sum: clouds =/ sunshine, even though of course clouds do let sunlight through. Just not a lot of it. An Applied Mathematics person at the University of Washington graphs the results in terms of solar radiation for you.
Even when it’s dry, we can’t win. We’re in our second week of a high pressure system parked overhead that you’d think would bring clear skies. Writes University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass:
High pressure is good, right? Sunny skies, light winds, and dry conditions? A nice break from stormy, wet conditions? Not necessarily true here over the western lowlands during cool season. For us, high pressure often brings something I personally dislike more than storms—endless low clouds.
It’s not just clouds of course–in December, Seattle only clocks about eight and a half hours of daylight to begin with. On our shortest day, the sun rises at almost 8 a.m., and sets around 4:20 p.m. What’s the latté usage that day, do you suppose? Go ahead, pop a Vitamin D supplement. The Seattle Times bottom lines it for you:
“You’re in a dark, gloomy place,” said Bruce Hollis, a leading vitamin D researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina. “In the winter, you could stand outside naked for five hours and nothing is going to happen.”
Or, you could lose over 15 percent of your body weight, which has also been shown to increase vitamin D.
For much of December, adds the Times, just to make sure you realize what’s what, you get that same 4:20 p.m. sunset while the sun rises later and later. It’s an interesting way to make the holiday season feel more stressed than usual–“Not enough hours in the day!”–without you being aware of where the time’s going.
Natives cultivate a mushroom pallor and claim not to notice anything’s amiss. The rest of us are left to our over-caffeinated devices. For myself, I’ll be on flip-flop assignment in the Caribbean next week. Try to keep things together until I get back with the slideshow.
