It is that time of the year where people complain about how early the sun sets. Equally, now that I live on the east coast of the US, it is that time of the year where I cannot help myself and have to retort by saying it is worse in Belgium.

See, Belgium is more north than all of the continental USA, which already makes the days in Belgium during the winter months shorter in absolute sunrise→sunset numbers. Of course, Belgium is not the far north either. There are many places in Alaska, Canada, and Northern Europe that are further north than Belgium. Many of those may very well have it worse. Belgium does have an extra ace up its sleeve. There is a bonus cover of clouds throughout much of late fall, winter, and early spring. Really helps make people SAD.

Since I reiterate this point… often, I figured I would make the effort and throw some numbers together here. My usual go to for a nice overview is to go a city’s page on Wikipedia. For cities, this will usually have a climate subsection in its geography section. The climate section will usually have a weather overview table. That table will usually have a listing of the mean sunshine hours per month. What is the genius visualisation of differences that I will present in this blog post? Ye, you got me, I am just going to throw the numbers from a few city pages together in a table here.

Numbers represent “mean monthly sunshine hours”, rounded to the hour from their respective Wikipedia tables.

City J F M A M J J A S O N D =
Brussels 59 73 126 171 198 199 203 192 155 113 66 49 1604
DC 145 152 204 228 261 283 281 263 225 204 150 133 2528
Seattle 70 109 178 207 254 268 312 281 222 143 73 53 2170
London 61 79 125 177 208 208 218 202 157 115 71 55 1675
Stockholm 44 75 150 216 277 277 280 235 170 96 45 33 1899
Miami 220 217 277 294 301 289 309 288 262 260 220 216 3154

Note that despite Stockholm’s totals being higher than Brussels, its winter months do look worse. Stockholm’s total is just lifted by the summer months. I should probably add a column totalling just a selection of months around December.

This was just a small list to get this idea of a blog post out. Cities are selected based on what I think of right now as an interesting comparison. Yes, it is going to be Europe-USA centric, that is where I have lived. Might add more cities over time.