Wachowski, 77, is a retired meteorologist, but since 1980 he has recorded sunshine data with official transistor sensors mounted atop his home in southwest suburban Burbank. He set up his home operation after the National Weather Service abandoned sunshine monitoring in the early 1980s, allowing him to keep the equipment and monitor data independently.
Wachowski said that in part, the lack of snowfall could be to blame. If a snowstorm blows through Chicago, the tightly packed cloud cover might dissipate. In the meantime, the clouds have been locked between a layer of cold air close to the ground with warmer air above the clouds.
“When you have an inversion, you have low clouds that stick around,” Wachowski said. “Lack of wind contributes to giving us this situation,” he said, along with unseasonably high temperatures, which this year have been 2 degrees to 2.5 degrees above average for December.
Essentially, “winds blew clouds in early in the month, and they stayed there,” said Bill Nelson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who monitors the Chicago area.
Wachowski said there’s an interest in tracking the sunshine shortage in part because of how extended periods of darkness can effect people.
“When it’s cloudy like this, it does have an effect on people,” he said. “It is kind of gloomy, you feel tired all the time.”