Does Bend, aka “the Paradise of the Cascades,” really get 300 sunny days a year? Not according to the weather experts.
In KOHD’s “You Ask, We Answer” feature, meteorologist Adam Clark answers a question from a viewer in Bend who wanted to know if the frequently heard 300-sunny-days claim is legit. Short answer: Nope – it’s exaggerated by more than 60%.
“According to George Taylor, who wrote the book ‘Climate of Oregon,’ for a sunny day we need 15% or less of the sky to be covered by clouds over the 24-hour period,” Clark explains. “A mostly sunny day is indicated by 15-30% cloud coverage [or less], and this type of coverage totals 51% of the days we see here in Central Oregon. After doing the math, the total number of days recorded as ‘sunny’ is 186. So there you have it.”
The catch here is that the claim as typically stated is not that Bend has 300 sunny days per year; it’s that Bend has 300 days of sunshine – a subtle but very important distinction.
According to The Wandering Eye’s anonymous but highly reliable sources, a sophisticated scientific procedure was employed to establish that Bend enjoys “300 days of sunshine.”
Back in the 1950s, a special high-tech sensory device (a pencil stuck vertically into the top of a cardboard box) was placed on the roof of the old Bend post office building for one year and constantly monitored by a small boy who recorded every time that the sun shone brightly enough to make the pencil cast a shadow for at least 10 consecutive seconds. Whenever that occurred at least once in any 24-hour period – voila! – a “day of sunshine.”
So there you have it – the real story. Unless somebody has a better one.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2009.
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a ten second shadow? seriously? I think that version of a “day of sunshine” is seriously flawed. Who actually calls the entire day a sunny one if only ten seconds of sunshine happens? That needs to be changed.
“Day of sunshine” does mean something if you’re coming from the Valley, which is where most Bend residents and visitors used to come from. If you’ve lived over there, you know how psychologically crushing it is to go months without seeing the sun, and how nice it is if the sun comes out even for a few minutes. So believe it or not, “day of sunshine” is actually worth something, but if you’re like many Bend residents who nowadays are from California and not the Willamette Valley, the sun here is underwhelming to say the least (except in July).
In short, “day of sunshine” is a measurement that only means something within Oregon’s borders. By Oregon standards (keeping in mind Oregon is not famed for sunshine), Bend is a really sunny place. If you are coming from, say, Palm Springs, you will not be impressed by Bend’s sunniness.
Jon — It was a joke; I made that story up. But the real story might be something similar.
Many places around the world also make the “300 days of sunshine” claim. The following was published by the Colorado Climate Center:
“Question: How much sunshine do we get in Colorado? On average for a year, how many days does the sun shine in Colorado?”
“Answer:
This is a question that comes up several times per year. You will find in many Chamber of Commerce publications from all areas of Colorado that we get at least 300 days of sunshine each year. The only problem is, there is no official definition of “days of sunshine” so there is no data set that you can easily turn to.
“Have you ever wondered if anyone actually keeps track of stuff like this? It turns out that for many years, three locations in Colorado have operated an instrument called a “sunshine switch” — Pueblo, Denver and Colorado Springs. If this instrument is cleaned and perfectly calibrated (which it rarely is), it can tell you minute by minute each day when the sun was shining. We did a study over 10 years ago based on these three stations and found that for Denver if you count every day when the sun came out for at least one hour, that then you could come up with an average of around 300 “days of sunshine” each year.”
The “300 days of sunshine” claim (like so much else about Bend) seems to have been copied from other places. Klamath Falls, Wenatchee, WA, Park City, UT, the Languedoc Roussillon region of France, Spain’s Costa del Sol and the island of Crete all also claim “300 days of sunshine.” In the case of Crete and the Costa del Sol the claim might be legitimate.
created the 300 day sunshine bulls***
after reading all of this — it still seems as though even 1-hr of sunshine doesn’t quantify or qualify the ‘day’ as being sunny. Something should be done! 🙂
That was a good one, almost as good as Mannix runnin’ for Lt Gov
Mmm, big firm tuts