2009-02-01

Daylight

As I go slowly insane while analyzing data, I find myself wanting to analyze more data. Thanks to the efforts of the U.S. military, I can fulfill these caprices. I have concocted a few graphs to illustrate daylight in the different places where I've lived. These graphs do not include the effects of weather. Note that southern CT is not included, as it has roughly the same longitude as Cedar Rapids, IA.

First up is a graph of minutes of daylight per day versus time of year.


Delft gets over 1,000 minutes of daylight per day in the middle of the summer. Or, rather, the cloud-layer over Delft gets this daylight. Boston and Cedar Rapids only have small differences in daylight per day.

I was wondering how much less daylight Delft gets per year than Iowa, and to my surprise, Delft gets more daylight!




The second graph is a zoom of the previous graph. As you can see, Delft gets roughly one more day of daylight each year than Cedar Rapids and Boston.

I am looking forward to the days following the Equinox here. One thousand minutes of daylight. Sounds like a novel.

5 comments:

alison said...

I dunno, I'm not convinced that an extra day of sunlight is a good trade for that much more variance over the year.

Although I guess 1000 minutes of sunlight means if you sleep 8 hours a night (not that you do) you could conceivably avoid seeing nighttime at all for days, which sounds strangely awesome.

oogRobot said...

Though a second, winter job in Australia or South Africa sounds tempting, I would miss winter too much.

clare said...

Last year I avoided seeing daylight (in Cedar Rapids) almost entirely Monday-Friday. It was not strangely awesome.

Avoiding such a fate could get complicated with < 8 hrs daylight.

oogRobot said...

Re: avoiding daylight, my building's windows help prevent a batcave atmosphere, though we're trying with the optical room we need to setup. The far-away picture of the library at my previous post is from my desk:

http://oogrobot.blogspot.com/2008/09/world-is-quiet-here.html

Liz! said...

Clare's crazy...<3 sunlight!

the real question on the sunlight variance is how much it affects the temperature variance...