Days are still getting shorter in the Chicago area, but there is good news on the horizon, both literally and figuratively.
A series of key daylight milestones are coming up, and even as the weather gets colder in the Chicago area, there will be signs that summer may be closer than we think.
The first of those milestones will occur on Monday according to the website Sunrise-Sunset.org. On that date, the Chicago area will see its earliest sunset of the year, when the sun dips below the horizon just before 4:21 p.m.
Since the Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect oval, the winter solstice does not line up perfectly with the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise of the year, and as a result Chicago will slowly start seeing later sunsets in the lead-up to the solstice, even though days will still technically be getting shorter.
That’s because sunrise will continue to happen later and later in the morning, slowly chipping away at the amount of daylight the Chicago area will see in a given day.
That will continue past the winter solstice on December 21, when the Chicago area will see just under nine hours and 11 minutes of daylight.
From that day forward for the next six months, days will be getting longer, albeit extremely slowly at first. In fact, by the end of December, Chicago will have gained just over three minutes of daylight, with the sun setting at 4:31 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.
That rate will slowly start to accelerate in the month of January, and Chicago will observe another milestone on January 4 when sunrise occurs just before 6:47 a.m. After that, sunrise will begin occurring earlier in the day, and the Chicago area will begin gaining a minute of daylight per day, with that rate gradually increasing as time moves along.
By the end of January, sunset will be occurring after 5 p.m., and the Chicago area will exceed 10 hours of daylight on January 30.
Meteorological winter will end on March 1, daylight saving time will begin on March 8, and by the end of that month, the city of Chicago will be seeing more than 12 hours of daylight, giving hope to residents who may be sick of winter by that point in the calendar.