In the wee hours of Sunday morning, March 8, millions of clocks will automatically move ahead one hour as the United States, at least much of it, moves into daylight saving time for another year.
If you’ve been following my musings over the years, you know that I am not a fan of the “moving of the clocks.” I would rather we stick with one of these times, preferably just permanent daylight saving time. That would mean we would have 8 a.m. sunrises for about six weeks in the winter, but we would never have a sunset earlier than 5:11 p.m.
As intuitive as it may seem, moving the clocks one hour doesn’t do anything to the amount of daylight. Rather, it just shifts when it occurs. Later sunsets return, moving from 5:34 p.m. on March 1 to 7:09 p.m. by month’s end.
If you are a morning person, you might not be a fan of daylight saving time because it means we’re back to sunrises after 7 a.m. for a little while. The good news is we are gaining daylight at 2 minutes and 51 seconds by the time we flip those clocks, so it doesn’t take very long to get back to where we were before the change.
To illustrate how quickly this daylight is going to grow when we do flip the clocks ahead for that hour, there will be about 11 hours and 34 minutes of daylight (on March 8). By the time we get to the end of March, we’re going to gain about another hour, for a total of 86 minutes more daylight for the month. And we’ll still have nearly three more hours to go heading toward the summer solstice, June 21.
Just another marker of spring
Whether you have a love or hate relationship with the time change, the reality is this is just another marker of the spring season. Solar spring, which heralded the three months of greatest daylight gain, started on Feb. 6, and meteorological spring starts with the beginning of March.
Of course, astronomical spring starts on March 20, the spring equinox.
And already we’re seeing and hearing small signs of this transition season between winter and summer.
Before March 8 arrives, you’re going to hear birdsong more frequently in the morning and some of those early-blooming shrubs, such as witch hazel (also known as hamamelis), will be showing their color. If crocuses are planted in a south-facing spot, they’re likely going to push through even with snow still on the ground in other areas.
How did daylight saving time start?
After first introduced during World War I to save energy, daylight saving time became standardized and the law of nearly all of the land with the Uniform Time Act of 1966.
Interestingly, we now switch the clocks even earlier than we did from 1987-2006, by a couple of weeks, so the time we’re on standard time is even shorter than it was 20 or so years ago. In 2007, DST was changed to start on the second Sunday in March.
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