jazzluvr wrote:Campagnolo wrote:Portland native here, if anyone has any questions.
Yeah. My biggest concern are the reputed 20-30-day spans "without any sunlight," people up there lacking in vitamin D and getting SAD because of it and needing full-specturm lights, etc. I'd be moving from the SF Bay Area, and according to some stats I saw on some weather site, average number of hours of sunlight per day here is 6.5 whereas in Portland it's 1.5.
How bad is it, really? And are there areas that are sunnier than others? I somehow get the feeling the eastern neighborhoods (like Sellwood) might be sunnier and less dreary than sw.
I don't think there are really areas that are sunnier than others. Keep in mind that the entire Portland area is a lot smaller than the Bay Area, and it doesn't have a big bay affecting the weather in odd ways. A solid cloud cover over most of the Willamette Valley is not likely to have convenient holes in it over Sellwood. If anything, the outlying SW suburbs are a few degrees cooler in the summer and a few degrees warmer in the winter.
Personally, I wear sunglasses off and on nearly year-round. It sounds silly to say it, but the clouds are bright freaking white. I can't look at the sky comfortably, whether the sun is out or not. And I have a hard time not dismissing SAD as a ridiculous fantasy affliction invented by whiny hypochondriacs. Maybe I get all the vitamin D I need from milk, I dunno. I have little patience with such things.
A lot of warm-staters move up here and immediately (and incessantly) start bitching about the weather, as if we misled them about it when we were begging them to move up here to destroy our real estate market. Maybe they've only visited in August or something and expect the entire year to be like that. My parents are from the Bay Area and say our weather is actually pretty comparable, minus the morning fog.
http://countrystudies.us/united-states/ ... rtland.htm
http://countrystudies.us/united-states/ ... ncisco.htm
SF has warmer winters, Portland has warmer summers. Precipitation is not wildly different, although Portland is slightly wetter year-round.
As for sun:
--LinkRemoved--
Comparable to SF in the summer, about half as much sun as SF in the fall/winters.
We do go 20-30 days where it rains every day, but that will also include sun breaks. Sometimes we get in a weather pattern where it rains overnight and the days are (at least partially) sunny. Sometimes the mornings are awful and rainy and the sun comes out in the afternoon. And sometimes, yes, it's grey and drizzly for days on end.
My one plea is that you please, for the love of god, learn how to drive in the rain. We do not slow down in the rain, unless we're stuck behind some idiot Californian who's afraid of wet roads. We put wet-weather tires and good wiper blades on our cars and we go the exact same speed as when the roads are dry (leaving a little more stopping distance, perhaps).
. I am going crazy waiting for L&C to get to getting.
