Bleakness Quantified

Remember my informal rain/sun stats?  It's been pretty lousy here for the past couple of days, and today is particularly bad because we are have 60-80 km/h wind gusts along with the rain.  I was looking at the weather forecast, trying to decide if I should send the kids to soccer practice tonight, or just declare the weather unfit for American children.  I found an interesting site with nice little graphs that explain just how rotten the weather really is here.  Have a look!  (I've included some excerpts below).

Here is the median cloud cover for an average February in Kiel:

The median daily cloud cover (black line) with percentile bands (inner band from 40th to 60th percentile, outer band from 25th to 75th percentile).

"The median cloud cover is 89% (mostly cloudy) and does not vary substantially over the course of the month.
On February 14, a representative day, the sky is clear or mostly clear 10% of the time, partly cloudy 11% of the time, and mostly cloudy or overcast 66% of the time."

For comparison, here is Chapel Hill in February (Durham is not listed.  Bad Website, bad, bad!)

The median cloud cover ranges from mostly clear (14%) to mostly clear (19%).

The median daily cloud cover (black line) with percentile bands (inner band from 40th to 60th percentile, outer band from 25th to 75th percentile).

"On February 14, a representative day, the sky is clear or mostly clear 58% of the time, partly cloudy 3% of the time, and mostly cloudy or overcast 28% of the time."

Okay, okay, so February is bad up north.  So what, you say. It will get better!  Here's June:

The median cloud cover is 70% (partly cloudy) and does not vary substantially over the course of the month.

The median daily cloud cover (black line) with percentile bands (inner band from 40th to 60th percentile, outer band from 25th to 75th percentile).

"On June 15, a representative day, the sky is clear or mostly clear 23% of the time,partly cloudy 23% of the time, and mostly cloudy or overcast 46% of the time."

 I guess you could call that 'better', in that Kiel looks better in June than Kiel does in February.  On the other hand, Chapel Hill looks better in February than Kiel looks in June.  Don't even get me started on the precipitation stats!  You can have a look for yourself, if this hasn't bored you to death already.