Après la pluie, le soleil

As Sam and Claudia pointed out, the amount of rainfall an area gets isn't the whole answer. It's what I said about Rouen, too — it doesn't rain in excessive amounts there, it just rains lightly much of the time.

Do you think weather like this counts as sunny or cloudy?

So another climate measure the experts keep track of is annual hours of sunshine. It turns out that some of the rainiest cities are also some of the sunniest: Bordeaux, Montpellier, La Rochelle, Grenoble.

Here's a list from sunniest to dreariest, in hours of sunshine (heures d'ensoleillement) per year:

Nice ......... 2694
Montpellier .. 2687
Perpignan .... 2506
La Rochelle .. 2250
Bordeaux ..... 2084
Toulouse ..... 2047
Grenoble ..... 2031
Lyon ......... 1976
Limoges ...... 1974
Nantes ....... 1956
Clermont ..... 1907
Besançon ..... 1872
Rennes ....... 1851
Tours ........ 1845
Dijon ........ 1831
Orléans ...... 1805
Paris ........ 1797
Caen ......... 1764
Brest ........ 1749
Reims ........ 1729
Romorantin ... 1716
Rouen ........ 1687
Metz ......... 1638
Strasbourg ... 1637
Lille ........ 1600

The southwest is definitely the land of sunshine: draw a line from Montpellier to La Rochelle and the cities south of it are the sunniest ones in France. And the northeast is the least sunny: Rouen, Metz, Strasbourg, and Lille win the cloudiest prize.

Tours (14th) is sunnier than Paris (17th), but Romorantin (21st) is drearier. So Saint-Aignan must be about tied with Paris, since we are halfway between Tours and Romo.

Or maybe Saint-Aignan has its own climate. There certainly are micro-climates in all countries and regions. Actually, La Renaudière, the hamlet we live in, has its own climate compared to the area down by the banks of the Cher River, one kilometer distant.

In 2003 — five years ago already — I was at La Renaudière one day at the beginning of February. While I poked around in this house we had decided to buy, measuring rooms to see if our San Francisco furniture would fit and thinking of all the possibilities, I had left the shutters closed. In one room it was too dark, though, so I opened up. It had started snowing!

Snow at La Renaudière, February 2003

In just a few minutes, a good dusting of light snow had covered the ground. I thought, well, I'd better get going before the roads become impassable, especially the little lane that leads out of La Renaudière down a steep hill back to the main road along the river. I slipped and slid down the hill in a little Peugeot 205, and when I got to the bottom of the hill there was no snow at all. It was raining.

Often there is fog along the river but not up here on the edge of the vineyard. You can see the fog shrouding the river valley when you're out walking the dog in the morning. And I'm sure we get a lot more wind than spots down along the river, which are protected by the higher terrain all around them.

Meanwhile, we now keep our own rainfall statistics.

Average annual rainfall in Tours: 684 mm
Average annual rainfall in Romo: 733 mm

Total rainfall at La Renaudière:
2005 — 449 mm
2006 — 591 mm
2007 — 587 mm

In 2005, we were in drought conditions — that's clear. But it's funny about 2006, which seemed like a basically dry, sunny year, and 2007, which was a gray, rainy, wash-out of a year. So much for rainfall statistics.