This is fascinating. Almost all of Poland has as much sun as only the southernmost part of Britain. No wonder it was occupied for so many years in the past: it must have been quite productive and therefore valuable agriculturally, let alone any mineral wealth. The Wiki page about it reports that Poland was fought over since long before 1795, when it ceased to exist as an independent nation until 1918, and later there were the Nazi's, as we all know.
I found an 1950s map for sunshine in Canada, it's at similarly antiquated government website: http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/archives/3rdedition/environment/climate/020
I grew up in a part of Canada that gets over 2200 hours/yr of sunshine (wikipedia says 2400) - but sunshine doesn't correlate to warmth, naturally! You can always tell the particularly cold days (-20C and colder) by the sharp blue sky.
Canada's most northern province as well as Alaska get more hours of direct sunlight than Solar power leader germany! However I suspect that germany's lower figure might possibly be due to cloud cover. You can generate some solar power on cloudy days. A less important consideration is the angle to the sun. The collected flux per area of country falls off as the cosine of that angle. However, as long as you are not actually filling the country up with solar panels that does not matter since you can always tilt the panels to point at the sun and just spread them out more so they don't shade each other.
This is fascinating. Almost all of Poland has as much sun as only the southernmost part of Britain. No wonder it was occupied for so many years in the past: it must have been quite productive and therefore valuable agriculturally, let alone any mineral wealth. The Wiki page about it reports that Poland was fought over since long before 1795, when it ceased to exist as an independent nation until 1918, and later there were the Nazi's, as we all know.
ReplyDeleteGreat map, and that website name? Yeah!
I found an 1950s map for sunshine in Canada, it's at similarly antiquated government website: http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/archives/3rdedition/environment/climate/020
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a part of Canada that gets over 2200 hours/yr of sunshine (wikipedia says 2400) - but sunshine doesn't correlate to warmth, naturally! You can always tell the particularly cold days (-20C and colder) by the sharp blue sky.
Blogworthy! Thank you, Kate.
DeleteCanada's most northern province as well as Alaska get more hours of direct sunlight than Solar power leader germany! However I suspect that germany's lower figure might possibly be due to cloud cover. You can generate some solar power on cloudy days. A less important consideration is the angle to the sun. The collected flux per area of country falls off as the cosine of that angle. However, as long as you are not actually filling the country up with solar panels that does not matter since you can always tilt the panels to point at the sun and just spread them out more so they don't shade each other.
DeleteMy Norwegian ancestors did NOT get enough vitamin D, I can see.
ReplyDelete