Thursday 15 December 2016

For One Day Only

Complaining about the lack of sunshine worked for once and Wednesday was a lovely day for December. With hardly any breeze and some lengthy spells of sunshine it felt very pleasant.
Temperature and Solar Radiation Records for 09-15 December 2016
It's difficult to measure how many hours of sunshine we get each day. My weather station does this my measuring the amount of solar radiation falling on a sensor. However, in December, with the sun almost at its lowest position in the sky even on a sunny day there's not a lot of difference between the values on a dull day (Tuesday) compared to a sunny day (Wednesday). I've added the yearly chart for solar radiation for 2016 to compare the values throughout the year.
High Solar Radiation Values for 2016
Thursday 15 December 2016 is the earliest sunset time of the year and from tomorrow it becomes later even though our hours of daylight continue to decrease until 21 December.
Sunrise & Sunset Times for Wakefield (http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/wakefield)
The above table shows the sunrise and sunset time for Wakefield. As you can see the differences in daylight hours each day are very small but the days will be lengthening from 21 December even if the worst of the winter weather in January and February maybe still to come.

6 comments:

  1. Well, this is interesting. I wasn't paying too much attention to UV. Just daily like when the sun goes behind the tall trees. Now when i want to see it it doesn't show up on the computer, too dark here yet this morning, I think. Learn something new every day!

    The weatherman has forecast rain for this evening: "This is an interesting storm in that there is lots of low level very moist warm air to work with (warm air holds much more water vapor than cool air)." With this note: "Weather radars do not measure this kind of rainfall very well (much of the precipitation occurs below the radar beam and the rainfall algorithms are more tuned for bigger raindrops) so expect the gauges will be reporting much more rain than what the radars will be indicating." I'm going to put out my old style rain guage as well.

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  2. OK Got it. 7:30 am here. Solar radiation is at 30. Your high today was 60 at 11 am, at 7:30 am you were around 10. Totally overcast here. Curious now about my high for today.

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    Replies
    1. Our high at this time of year seems to be about 150 or 160 with the weather station in sunshine. One day in November we had a high value of 30 when it didn't seem to get light all day!

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    2. High here yesterday (the 15th) was 222 without sun. Must be position of the sun in the sky as you say.

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  3. Never really realize the solar radiation impact!

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    Replies
    1. We just don't have enough sunshine in December.

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