2016 Weather- Did We Make 300 Days of Sunshine?

My experiment is over! I can't believe I kept track of the amount of sun we had every day for the year. I had to check and see if the "300 days of sunshine in the Tri Cities" was true. It seemed to good to be true!! However, I kept track and our total days of lots of sunshine were.....

298 DAYS OF SUNSHINE A YEAR!!

That is pretty darn close to 300 days of sunshine a year!


We had 235 days that were perfectly sunny all day long. There was barely a cloud in the sky and you could count on the whole day to be sunny and pretty.

We also had 63 days where at LEAST half the day was sunny. Days like these were days where it was cloudy in the morning and then by lunchtime it was beautiful. Other days may have been beautiful and sunny and then clouds rolled in in the late afternoon. These were the days where you could get outside and spend lots of time without worrying about getting rained on.

So the total sunny days were:  298 days.

We had 68 cloudy/overcast days.

 I counted a cloudy/overcast day as any day with 2-3 or less hours of sun. Most of these 68 days were cloudy and overcast from morning until night. There were 14 or so days where there might have been an hour or two of sun, but it wasn't enough to make it worth counting as a "sunny days." Often times, this might have been the hour before sunset in the winter. That seemed to happen a lot in January and December. It would be cloudy all day and then an hour or so before sunset, it would get sunny.  I still counted them as cloudy days though.

As I kept track of weather, I kept track of days where we had winds of +20 mph. We had 27 days like this. I honestly thought it would be more. I guess it's not as windy as we thought! Well, we still had a breeze frequently, but it wasn't the crazy kind of wind where you couldn't even stand to go outside.

Also, for being known as a desert, we had 47 days where we had some rain. That seems a lot for a desert! Now, granted, we probably didn't get much rain and I didn't measure how much rain we actually got, but we still had 47 days where we had at least some rain. Most of these 47 days were on the "cloudy/overcast" days.

Our yearly weather total for 2016 through December: 

Sunny: 235 days
Some sun/some clouds: 63 days
Cloudy: 68 days

Snow: 9 days
Fog: 14 days
Rain: 47 days
Crazy Winds (over 20 mph): 27 days
Smoke from Fires: 2 days