Thursday, December 24, 2015

Which city has longer days; Aurora, IL or San Ramon, CA ?

The summer of 2015, my family and I relocated from Aurora, IL (suburbs of Chicago, IL) to San Ramon, CA (suburbs of San Francisco, CA). The first thing my family and I noticed was that there is definitely more sunlight in San Ramon. Thinking of sunlight, I asked my elder daughter Rishika if she thinks that the days in CA seem longer when compared to IL, she said, Why don't you viz that!” This is what I ended up with...

The first thing I did was look for Sunrise and Sunset times on the web and I came across http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php website. I downloaded the data for Aurora and San Ramon for 2014 and started to visualize.

As I started to visualize, I was totally surprised to see that the two cities have longer days in different months. During the summer months, the Sun rose earlier in Aurora and the sunset was pretty close in both cities. Whereas in winter months, sun rose at the same time in both cities but the sun set a little later in San Ramon. Overall, to my surprise, Aurora, IL has 6 hours and 20 minutes of longer daytime in a year.

Here is the viz that gives which city has longer days daily, monthly, and annually.