It's easy to keep your head in the clouds in one of the nation's cloudiest cities, which is right here in Ohio. Geography and winter weather are among the biggest reasons for the gray skies.
While some cities such as Phoenix are met with over 3,000 hours of sunshine each year (more than one-third of the year), others see far fewer, according to a new WorldAtlas report. The publication ranked cities using total annual sunshine hours from long-term National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration averages.
Here's how the nation's cloudiest major cities compare.
How cloudy is Ohio? Columbus ranks No. 4 in the U.S.
Columbus averages about 2,183 hours of sunshine each year, placing it among the cloudiest major cities in the Great Lakes region, according to the report.
WorldAtlas says Ohio winters are often
heavily overcast because cold air moving across the relatively warm Great Lakes helps create persistent cloud cover. Although Columbus itself isn't located on a Great Lake, it still experiences many of the same cloudy weather patterns.
The 10 cloudiest major cities in the U.S.
According to the report, these 10 major US cities have the fewest hours of sunshine per year:
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 2,021 hours of sunshine
- Anchorage, Alaska: 2,061
- Seattle, Washington: 2,170
- Columbus Ohio: 2,183
- Portland, Oregon: 2,341
- Detroit, Michigan: 2,436
- Indianapolis, Indiana: 2,440
- Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 2,484
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 2,498
- Chicago, Illinois: 2,508
Cloudiest rankings change depending on how it's measured
Despite the clouds, there may be a silver lining for some cities.
Pittsburgh takes the top spot when major cities are ranked by total sunshine hours, according to WorldAtlas. But that's not the case when cloud cover is measured another way.
When looking at the number of genuinely cloudy days, WorldAtlas says that Juneau, Alaska, is the cloudiest major city in the country, with only about 44 full-sun days each year.
Around the Great Lakes, Buffalo and Cleveland each record more than 200 overcast days a year, thanks to the same lake-effect weather patterns that often keep skies gray in Columbus and Detroit.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: This Ohio city ranks among the cloudiest US cities
