Carrick posted a link to some old sunshine data.
There were two entries for Arkansas. Data ends in 1990. There are multiple columns. I chose the first: “Flat-Plate Collector Facing South at Fixed Tilt=0”.
For July the correlation was .629 and .685. Considering that I am comparing local sunshine to the whole states temperature, not bad. Too bad there isn’t more recent data.
You can download the UK Met data for Heathrow here.
If you graphed the difference from the mean % for Tmax (Maximum Temperature) versus Bright Sunshine for the month of July, it would look like this:
The Hockey Schtick blog has a new post about a paper noting that in the Netherlands “global summer average sunshine … dimmed during period 1958-1983 [prompting an ice age scare], but markedly increased from 1985-2010.” The paper is here.
Just a reminder that UK sunshine went up starting at almost exactly the same time:
“The recent trends in winter precipitation have been accompanied by respective trends in sunshine (significant increase in all subregions of 17 to 29%)”
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY
Int. J. Climatol. 27: 17–46 (2007)
Published online 6 July 2006 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/joc.1377
http://coast.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/pdf/Auer.histalp.2007.pdf
sunshine hours 