User:Average Portuguese Joe/sandbox

Sunshine hours for Portugal
I was thinking of doing this for some time now and I finally had the time to do it. As most of the data for sunshine duration in IPMA is from 1961-1990 and some from 1971-2000 I really wanted to have some more recent data and not the same old data used for 30 years, so I searched for it in the German Meteorological Service website and surprisingly found some.

Analising this data, the obvious aspects were: An increase in overall sunshine hours except for Bragança and Lajes which may have been due to erroneous 1961-1990 stations as Lajes, by definition, should supposedly have less sunshine hours than, for example, Ponta Delgada as its further west in the Azores, with the recent data now indicating precisely that.

Another thing was that in some of the cities there was an increase in insolation levels in the first half of the year followed by a decrease or no variation in the second half compared to the 1961-1990 average. Another not that obvious aspect was the weakening or even the total disappearance of the June Gloom phenomenon characteristic of the Macaronesian islands, or maybe it just blended in with another month? I'm gonna leave this last one to actual climatologists who can explain me why this has happened.

The cities or places that increased their values the most from the 1961-1990 period were, respectively, Santa Maria Island, Ponta Delgada, Porto Santo Island and Castelo Branco.

The sunniest place in Portugal (and Europe) which at least has a climatological station continues to be Faro, this time with over 3100 hours of sunshine a year, even though these are only 16 years of data (missing the last 12 years and 3 years before 1993) I do believe the values in Faro are correct, there is also this study which took IPMA's data from 1971-2004 and put Faro at a whopping 3193.5h.

Granted this data not only has missing months/years (which can result in higher or lower deviations) but also most probably has some days missing from each month too (resulting in less monthly hours), so the real values for a complete period are certainly a bit higher than the ones expressed here.

Here is the data with the respective recorded years:

(*)The values post 2010 got crazy to say the least, especially the last 3 years of data.

Algarve
These are not IPMA stations, and the values they are getting seem too extreme, maybe that's the difference between a proper station placement and an improper one (with these ones being the latter). Sunshine values also seem too high, according to them the minimum value of irradiation required to count as sunshine hours is 120 W/m^2, which is also the value recommended by WMO. Precipitation in March is a surprise given that it is usually the driest month of the low-sun half of the year.

Azores
And here we get a bit of mixing between two websites. I'm to this day questioning if both stations are the same, despite getting different values at times. anticiclone-acores.com is an amateur website, which is currently down, made by a group of people. I first immediately thought the station at wunderground was the same as in the website, the civil parish is the same after all, but the wunderground one indicates a different altitude and when the station of the amateur website lacked values, the former had them. I'm guessing they are the same but when the website transcribed data from wunderground it might have possibly generated errors.