Minnesota Will Lose A Depressingly Large Amount Of Daylight In August

Last night, I was relaxing after dinner and thought to myself, "Dang, it's already getting pretty dark out!" It was just after 8:30 pm, and sunset in Duluth is not long after that at the beginning of August.

Blame "the algorithm" or just pure coincidence, and I saw a tweet (are they still called tweets now that it's just called X?) from the Duluth office of the National Weather Service. That post encapsulated the somewhat depressing reality that we are definitely on the downhill slide of summer as they highlighted just how much daylight we're going to lose over the course of the month of August.

While it varies from place to place around the Land of 10,000 Lakes, we're set to shed well over an hour of daylight over the 31 days of this month, coming down pretty steeply from our peak of almost 16 hours of daylight (including twilight hours) in June.

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Here's how much daylight we're going to lose around parts of Minnesota in August:

• International Falls: 1 hour 35 minutes 8 seconds
• Ely: 1 hour 32 minutes 37 seconds
• Grand Marais: 1 hour 32 minutes 5 seconds
• Bemidji: 1 hour 31 minutes 7 seconds
• Moorhead: 1 hour 29 minutes 4 seconds
• Duluth: 1 hour 28 minutes 46 seconds
• Brainerd: 1 hour 27 minutes 22 seconds
• St. Cloud: 1 hour 24 minutes 52 seconds
• Minneapolis: 1 hour 22 minutes 57 seconds
• Mankato: 1 hour 20 minutes 29 seconds
• Rochester: 1 hour 20 minutes 4 seconds
• Owatonna: 1 hour 20 minutes 3 seconds

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While that is a sizable drop, we have a ways to go to the shortest day of the year, which is in late December. Places around the state will still see over 13 hours of light at the end of the month, while in December, it gets down to just under 9 hours of total daylight.