Outdoor Recreation is Gloomy Business in Michigan
Jan 6th, 2010 by Di
I find it funny – funny weird, not funny ha ha – how people look at the Upper Peninsula like it is an uninhabitable place where people freeze off their extremities, roads are nearly impassable, and SAD lights are common. You gotta be tough to up there! Well…the way I see it…
…is you gotta be tough to live down here…in mid-Michigan. Having lived in the UP, I know that dressing appropriately allows inhabitants of the great, white north to enjoy winter to the fullest, the roads are better after worse weather, and I never saw an SAD light, although I would be interested in trying one. Having lived in Lower Michigan, I know that abundant, cloudy weather makes it difficult to motivate for outdoor recreation, especially since those clouds are most likely to bring wind and rain rather than glorious snow.
Ride at Pontiac Lake Recreation Area on a cloudy
Thanksgiving Day.
Rumor has it that “a city” in Michigan is one of the cloudiest cities in the United States, and some people will rank it as either number one or two, but this is not true. It is true, however, that Michigan is pretty darn cloudy, and it doesn’t take a genius or fancy meteorological equipment to figure that out.
I decided to find a worthy source for data pertaining to the amount of cloud cover throughout the United States. I checked with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA has a beautiful, plain-text web page with the “Ranking of Cities Based on % Annual Possible Sunshine in Descending Order from Most to Least Average Possible Sunshine.” For those of you who are mathematically challenged, 
this means that the sunniest city, which is Yuma, Arizona, is at the top of the list with 90% annual average possible sunshine. The cloudiest city, which is Juneau, Alaska, is at the bottom of the list ranking at 174 with 30% annual average possible sunshine.
Clouds over Copper Harbor and Lake Superior.
Disclaimer: NOAA did not Di-proof the data by assigning each city with a rank, so I had to count down the list to figure out the Michigan rankings and the total number of cities where observations were made. Simply put, the rankings could be off by one or two, but that really doesn’t change my point. In hindsight, I should have copied and pasted the information into Word and then created an ordered list. Ah, well, live and learn.
Data was collected at the various sites for differing amounts of time up until 2004. The least data was collected in Pensacola, Florida for only five years, whereas the most data was collected in Blue Hill, Massachusetts for 112 years.
A plane flying into clouds
over the Pontiac Lake
Recreation Area.
How does all of this affect Michigan? Well, data was collected at six Michigan locations: Alpena, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Marquette, and Sault Ste. Marie (soo SAINT marIE for those of you who are not familiar with the funky pronunciations of Michigan cities). Data was collected for varying amounts of time:
- Alpena – 37 years
- Detroit – 31 years
- Grand Rapids – 36 years
- Lansing – 42 years
- Marquette – 21 years
- Sault Ste. Marie – 55 years
Detroit (dee TROIT ) was the first city to rank on this fantastic list at 140 with 53% annual average possible sunshine, while Grand Rapids was the cloudiest observed Michigan city ranking at 161 with only 46% annual average possible sunshine:
- 140 Detroit 53%
- 147 Lansing 51%
- 151 Marquette 50%
- 155 Alpena 48%
- 159 Sault Sainte Marie 47%
- 161 Grand Rapids 46%
Since Seattle is often used as a comparison for cloudiness, for the sake of comparison, it ranks at 160 with 47% annual average possible sunshine, just above Grand Rapids. Of the observed cities, the only ones with lower annual average possible sunshine are in Hawaii – yes, Hawaii, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia, and some U.S. territories.
While Michigan’s cities are not the cloudiest, or even the second cloudiest, they are most certainly at the bottom of the totem pole for sunshine. On average, Michigan cities have 49% annual average possible sunshine, which works out to about 179 sunny days per year.
I live in mid-Michigan, too, and I find I don’t think about the cloudy winter days ’til the sun comes out. Then I realize: “Oh! It’s been a long time since I’ve seen your lovely face! Is that why I’ve been so cranky? Come back more often…please don’t go…”
I lived in one of the cities that we always said was one of the cloudiest. Even if it wasn’t, the tail end of winter was so cold and dreary that you felt like you’d never be warm again, or feel the sun again, or even want to go outside again.
Really, even though it got wicked depressing, it helped make those first sunny spring days that much sweeter.
I hear that. Living in Michigan definitely makes me appreciate those 2-minute moments when the sun actually does come out.
Ha ha, thanks for sharing that! Nate keeps saying how cloudy Michigan is– Well, he’s from Grand Rapids! Even Seattle is sunnier!
lol – and now you have the proof!
Here in Seattle, we have some expressions that we propagate in order to keep people from moving here. One is that we have 250 overcast days a year. The rest of the time it’s just cloudy.