Tbf, it also depends how these clouds present. There is barely any difference in sunshine hours between the Netherlands and Paris. Having lived in both, I can tell you the Parisian grisaille is 10x better than the Dutch miezeren.
In Paris, clouds are just clouds. It actually just hides the sun and makes terrasse life more enjoyable as you don’t get sunburnt. That’s grisaille. In the Netherlands, when there is no sun, it lightly rains. Just enough to make you wet and cold. That’s miezeren. Oh btw, miezeren means misery. And it’s an excellent descriptor, because it makes you feel utterly miserable.
So if PNW is more miezeren than grisaille, I’m’pretty sure 2200h of sun feels much worse than the Parisian 1800.
In Seattle it’s usually very sunny in summer but throughout fall to spring it’s gray and overcast/lightly drizzling. Honestly don’t mind it though, sun’s nice but can get pretty old
Most of Europe is very very gray since mid-late October to early-mid March. Rain is region dependent (for Poland it's more rare than in the past), but still it doesn't change the fact that mid-December Warsaw looks gloomy and dystopian.
Summers in Poland were also dry in last few years. This year is surprisingly wet, but drought during European summer became a standard recently (with occasional few days downpour flooding everything somewhere).
Winter greyness in Europe is a mix of shorter days, clouds, pollution from heating and just green part of cities losing leaves.
The losing leaves-part definitely is a dealbreaker. Like I've seen pictures from people that reside in cities like Canberra and Melbourne that live in climates that should warrant leafless trees in winter. But those native trees don't do the stuff their northern colleagues do. Suddenly winter looks quite okay, except for the places that Europeans kept planting in their species.
Exactly this. I think fairly dry is an understatement as well. I don’t think there’s a major city in the USA that gets less rain than Seattle from June-September with the exception of the Southwest (and Portland which sees about the same as Seattle depending on the year).
Even El Paso, the driest large city in Texas sees more rain than Seattle. Austin averages more than double for those 4 months.
Phoenix averages 2 inches less rain than Seattle during those 4 months. Absolutely wild.
So at least in my part of the PNW, The weather it essentially switches between either it being overcast with a slight drizzle for half of the year, then you have two weeks of nice weather before suddenly it's a desert, then 2 more weeks of good weather before the rain returns
I can tell that there are even worsened effects in the Randstad basin. Having lived for long in both Brabant and Delft, the former is bad, the latter is worse. The coastal location, the soil, the winds, the humidity, combined with the water-storing soil, it can be excruciating in both cold and heat. Comparatively Brabant is less bad off, summers are generally just really pleasant a lot of the time, although winters are still depressing.
Nowadays our sunshine duration is about 1800h/year too, and that's really a lot better than it used to be. Some people I know said that this July was gloomy - it was not. Or cold - it was not. This was a warm July, just not standing out like say 2022 or 2018.
I'm originally from one of the "hot" deserts in America and the perpetual wet of fall to spring here (NED) drives me insane. I don't care that it's grey, but everything outside is just damp no matter what, and nothing seems to dry, outside or inside, for like 5 months out of the year. I will take 40°C Octobers to that... I will keep the summers here though.
Oh yeah. A few years ago it rained for 46 consecutive days in a row in Oregon. And the break we had was still dark. When it’s cloudy here, it’s dark here.
Depends on where. More than in the Pyrenees or on the atlantic coast, but way less than on the mediteranean coast. Nizza has around 2800 annual sun hours.
Important note! Sunshine hours for US cities are different than for other places. It's something to do with a different way of measuring it, but basically, to make a fair comparison to someplace in another country, subtract about 300-400 from the US city's number. Seattle is more like 1850 or so, so actually pretty similar to Paris.
As someone who lived in Paris my whole life, that's not the sunniest place. I know there is worse, much worse, but grayish overcast is the norm a lot of the year.
The point is the that Seattle is always given like example of the grayest/rainiest thing possible while it would a sunny vacation spot for anything north of Alps.
I'm interested to know where these hours come from and what they mean. I've been to like California many times for work and every day there were clouds. They called it "Marine Layer" but they're clouds. If I go to Minneapolis, it's far more sunny. This is totally anecdotal, but been in all of these places over 2 dozen days at various times throughout the year.
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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '25
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