Visualizing Alberta’s shift to permanent daylight time – Jacob Dawang

[giscus[bot]]

Visualizing Alberta’s shift to permanent daylight time – Jacob Dawang

Alberta is switching to permanent daylight time. People generally get the vibe of what this means: more sunlight in the evenings, more darkness in the mornings. But, I don’t think we understand exactly what this looks like concretely.

https://www.jacobdawang.com/blog/2026/alberta-daylight-time/

[nc-82]

I find a lot of discussion seems to compare permanent MDT vs permanent MST, instead of the actual change of permanent MDT vs status quo. It's the same problem we fall into with discussion alternatives to first-past-the-post voting.

If you mark out the weeks that are actually affected by the change on figure 1, you end up seeing that we're swapping about 3 extra weeks of waking up in the dark in exchange for a whole winter of still seeing the sun after 5 pm. Would permanent standard time be better? Probably. But currently almost all the weeks of standard time are at the time of the year when most people have to wake up in the dark either way.

And right now we have the worst possible schedule for switching to MDT, where you just start to have a couple weeks of morning sun and then BAM 2 more weeks of darkness. I can't imagine that's good for anyone's circadian rhythm (it certainly isn't good for mine.)