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by acchow 3390 days ago
Ski in the morning and play beach volleyball in the afternoon? What month of the year? Whistler-blackcomb tops out at only 8000ft.

Vancouver gets 1900 hours of sunlight a year. That's not a lot. Compare to Seattle (which is considered gloomy) at 2170 hours and SF at 3000 hours.
4 comments
allendoerfer 3390 days ago
> Vancouver gets 1900 hours of sunlight a year. That's not a lot. Compare to Seattle (which is considered gloomy) at 2170 hours and SF at 3000 hours.

Are you talking about sunlight or sunshine? I think these are different. The city where I live gets apparently between 1500 and 1800 hours of sunshine, is a bit South of Vancouver (but in Europe) and not particularly known for not being sunny. So the amount of sunshine could actually increase for immigrants, not coming from California.

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cperciva 3390 days ago
Ski in the morning and play beach volleyball in the afternoon? What month of the year? Whistler-blackcomb tops out at only 8000ft.

March or April. We've had an exceptionally harsh winter this year (snow on the ground in Vancouver for weeks on end -- happens about once a decade) but usually around now people are admiring the cherry blossoms on their way to the beach.

Whistler/Blackcomb has a perfectly skiable alpine through to the end of April, and you can ski past that if you want (but I wouldn't personally recommend it).

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acchow 3390 days ago
Ok, but even in May average high in Vancouver is 16.7C, average low of 8.8C. That's hardly beach volleyball weather. I'm skeptical of the claim that people ski in the morning and play beach volleyball in the afternoon...maybe one or two lucky days a year?

These are exactly the temperatures tons of people in this thread are saying is cold when referring to San Francisco. They actually correspond with March in SF.

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adamiscool8 3390 days ago
When people arrive in Vancouver, we rewire their hypothalamus with wildly lower expectations for what constitutes "amazing weather".
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titanomachy 3390 days ago
People definitely play beach volleyball in Vancouver in May. Maybe they are just insane. But some days are much warmer than 17C, and when it's sunny the air temperature doesn't matter that much.
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mantas 3390 days ago
16c is almost tshirt weather in northern europe, which is about same latitude as Vancouver. This would pass as a colder summer day too. No rain = beach :)

Everybody's perspective is different...

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ZoeZoeBee 3389 days ago
60 Farenheit is not T-Shirt Weather, it certainly is not beach weather, that's cold for a high. As far as the latitude that's fairly irrelevant thanks to the Atlantic Drift, Great Britain is at the same latitude as Southern Alaska though their climate is quite different
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wbl 3390 days ago
The fact that SF buildings are poorly insulated doesn't help.
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exDM69 3389 days ago
This!

I visited SF for the first time in December and at first I didn't realize why people were complaining about the cold when it was rather nice weather outside (I'm from 60 degrees north) and the weather was in the 60-70 Farenheit range (20 celsius) which I consider to be nice and temperate climate.

But after a week it hit me. It's cold as hell indoors! I have warmer in my house now than I had in my hotel room or office and it's snow and ice outside.

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run4yourlives2 3390 days ago
Blackcomb is open until late may, and then also has a summer season. (glacier)

Vancouver does get a lot of concentrated rain, but summers are sunnier than most cities in North America. 90% of that 1900 hours is between June and September.

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NathanCH 3390 days ago
Sunshine hours has more to do with the fact that the sun sets here at 4:00pm in the winter. More often than not it's sunny or cloudy with sunny breaks.
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acchow 3390 days ago
I'm 95% sure that's not how the earth's orbit works.

Sure, further from the equator makes your days shorter in the winter, but they're longer during the summer. It's awash.

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swsieber 3390 days ago
It is a wash, but judging from the comments the heavy rains/gloom come in the winter... so it could be a real explaination.
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acchow 3390 days ago
Actually, just the opposite. If most of the cloud cover/gloomy weather happened in the winter, then much of the clouds would be at night...which wouldn't dramatically reduce your sunshine hours.

If the gloominess happened during long days, you'd really see a drop in mean sunshine hours.

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