Daylight Saving Time ending
At 2 a.m. Sunday most of America will see time fall back an hour giving them an extra hour of sleep as Daylight Saving Time ends. It will be lighter in the morning when kids go off to school and their parents head to work.
But gaining an hour in the morning means losing one in the evening. It is going to be dark by shortly after 5 in the late afternoon Sunday.
An easy way to remember how DST affects our clocks and daily lives is the little saying, “Spring ahead, Fall behind.”
As we move toward the winter solstice Dec. 21, the days keep getting continually shorter. We are still losing about 3 minutes of sunlight a day, nearly 20 minutes a week. Through the month of November, the area loses 1 hour and 6 minutes of daylight. However, the rate of loss slows in December as we approach the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year.
Daylight Saving Time Ending
Date Sunrise Sunset Day length
Nov. 5 8:07 6:04 9 hrs 57 min
Nov. 6 7:08 5:02 9 hrs 54 min
Dec. 21 7:58 4:42 8 hrs 44 min
June 21 5:34 9:14 15 hrs 40 min
By the winter solstice Dec. 21, the sun rises at 7:59 and sets at 4:43 for only 8 hours and 44 minutes of sunlight. That compares to a day length of 15 hours and 40 minutes at the summer solstice June 21. That is just short of seven hours more sunlight. It won’t be until March 17 that we see an equal number of daylight hours and darkness hours.
Not only do the loss of sunlight and low angle of the sun contribute to dark days, so does the increasingly cloudiness we experience.
“The degree of cloudiness begins to increase, peaking during the month of November in Minnesota when two thirds of the days are mostly cloudy and most of the remaining days are partly cloudy,” University of Minnesota Climatologist Mark Seeley says. “This produces a condition of highly diffuse light rather than direct sunlight.”
There is less than a 40% chance of seeing the sun during November and perfectly clear days are almost unheard of, Seeley writes in his weekly Weather Talk column. “In this regard then, we not only lose day length (or quantity of light), but we also lose out on direct sunlight (or the quality of light).”
Daylight Saving Time starts again March 12.
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