When I got my first weather station for Christmas in 1992, it gave me all the usual weather readings you would expect, such as temperature, wind, humidity, barometric pressure, etc. However, it didn’t give the one statistic everyone wanted to know, which was how much sunshine go we get on any given day.

Moving to Anacortes from Southern California, sunshine was an important part of our lives. The climate change wasn’t as traumatic as I was afraid it was going to be, in fact I quickly grew to enjoy our newfound environment. But everyone still wanted to know how much sunshine we actually got “where it rains all the time”.

Each evening, in addition to recording the daily readings from my weather station, I would also write down the percentage of sunshine I thought we had that day. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but at least I had some data on sunshine. I recorded my first year of sunshine statistics in 1993. To date I have been keeping these records now for thirteen years.

Last year I upgraded my weather station, so now I have a sensor that reads solar radiation. When these readings are charted out on my computer, I can see which days are sunny, and which ones are not, based on how much solar radiation strikes the censor. So, now I have statistical data, besides my subjective data, on which to base my sun statistics.

When reporting my sun statistics, I decided that anything under 25% was a cloudy day. Partial sunny days were between 26% and 74%. Anything 75% or higher I counted as a sunny day.

From the thirteen years of gathering my sun statistics, I’ve found that Anacortes averages 134.7 sunny days a year. We average another 83.8 partial sunny days a year, with 146.6 days counted as overcast. When you add our sunny days and partially sunny days together, I discovered that almost two thirds of our days have more than 25 percent sunshine. The sunniest year I recorded was the first, with 163 sunny days. The year with the least amount of sunny days was 1996, with only 110. When you throw out those two years, the rest of the years are amazingly close to our average of 134.7.

As expected, December turns out to be the darkest month of the year, with only 6.2 sunny days on average. The second darkest month is January with an average of 6.5 sunny days. August wins the prize for the most sunny days with an average of 18, followed close behind by July with an average of 17.6.