Dusk arrives early these days — and it’s about to arrive even earlier when daylight saving time ends this Sunday. At 2 a.m. on Nov. 6, clocks “fall back” one hour as we return to standard time.
The century-old clock-changing ritual has sparked even more debate than usual this year ever since the Senate voted in March to make daylight saving time permanent. But with major changes to daylight saving time appearing unlikely for now, we still set the clocks back this weekend — and will probably “spring forward” next March.
The end of daylight saving time means we get an extra hour of sleep, which experts say is better for our health. For early risers, the return to standard time means we’ll see brighter mornings again — at least for a few weeks. But it comes at the expense of evening light, as the sun will set an hour earlier. On Sunday, most of the United States will see sunrise before 7 a.m. again. But sunset will return to the 5 o’clock hour (or earlier), and many of us will soon be heading home from work and school in the dark.
How do sunrise and sunset times change in the weeks ahead?
For those who dread falling back to standard time each November, there is one silver lining: Sunsets won’t get all that much earlier in the coming weeks after Sunday.
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“Due to peculiarities of the tilt of the Earth’s axis and its orbit, we lose far more daylight in the mornings at mid-latitudes after the beginning of standard time than we lose in the afternoons as the days continue to shorten,” CWG’s David Policansky wrote in an article last year.
The two tables below compare sunrise and sunset times on Nov. 6 (our first day back on standard time) and the winter solstice on Dec. 21.
Notice how in every city, sunrise times shift later significantly more than sunset times shift earlier. Between Nov. 6 and the winter solstice, Washington loses 43 minutes of morning light, but only 13 minutes in the evening.
Northern cities such as Seattle, Minneapolis and Boston each lose more than 45 minutes of morning daylight, but only 20 to 25 minutes in the evening.
In more southern locations, most of the remaining daylight loss between now and the winter solstice is skewed toward the mornings. Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami each lose at least half an hour of morning light, but sunset will hardly budge over the next six weeks. For example, in Miami, sunset on Dec. 21 is only two minutes earlier than it is on Nov. 6.
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Technically, the total loss of evening daylight is a few minutes more than shown in the table above. That’s because many places see their earliest sunset of the year during the first week of December, and it’s typically about 3 to 5 minutes earlier than sunset on the winter solstice. (The earliest sunset in Washington is at 4:45 p.m., while on the solstice sunset is at 4:49 p.m.)
But even when we take this into account, the loss of evening sunlight remains far less than the loss of morning light.
The upshot is that once we’re jolted back to early evening darkness after the daylight saving time ends, at least it doesn’t get much worse until the winter solstice (unless you live somewhere like Anchorage, where afternoon daylight continues to shrink by more than an hour, although still less than the 1½-hour loss of morning light).
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Early risers in most of the country can also take comfort in knowing that the latest sunrise of the year happens this Saturday — the day before daylight saving time ends. With less than seven weeks until the winter solstice, sunrise will not fully “catch up” to where it was before we set the clocks back an hour.
Washington’s latest sunrise this year is at 7:39 a.m. on Nov. 5. On Dec. 21, sunrise is at 7:23 a.m. The city’s latest sunrise on standard time (7:27 a.m.) is not until the first week of January.
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