When do the Clocks go Forward?
For anyone wanting to know when you’re going to have to get up out of bed an hour earlier when the clocks go forward this month, the day the clocks go forward in the UK is
Sunday 28th March 2010 at 1am
In the USA the clocks go forward on Sunday March 14th at 1am
So don’t forget to reset your clocks before you go to bed, and lets hope the kids don’t realise that they have lost an hour during the night.
Just for future reference for the UK the clocks always go forwards in Spring on the last Sunday in March, and go backwards on the last Sunday in October.
Spring forward, Fall (Autumn) back!
6 comments
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GMT? It’s been known as UTC since 1971.
As a southerner I prefer the Summers to have longer evenings, caused by changing the clocks to BST (UTC+0100) for 7 months of the year. However you cannot stay on BST all year round otherwise it will be dark in the mornings until 10 am local time in Scotland in the depths of Winter.
As well as the North/South problem, do also remember the Sun rises/sets 33 minutes later in the West of the country, compared to the East. This occurs because the UK spans roughly 1.8 deg East to 6.5 deg West (4 minutes of time per degree of physical separation) but is all on the same time zone.
The effect of Scotland being both to the North and to the West extreme makes the Scottish winter mornings already much darker than England. This is because the time zone is based on the Greenwich Meridian, which passes up the North Sea well to the east of any Scottish lands. Aberdeen, on the most Eastern part of Scotland, is located at 2 deg WEST, so their clocks are already 8 minutes ‘behind’ London before even taking into account the effect of being another 5 degrees more northerly from there. The UK stretches from 49.9 deg North to 59.9 deg North.
When looking at these facts, it is really useful to have a geographical globe, with day and might projected on to it, where you can spin it and zoom in and out, and select any date. It’s an eye opener.
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I appreciate what you say about GMT and UCT imposed on us by others, but you see I am a “Luddite”
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“We’ve been changing our clocks forwards and backwards in the UK since 1916. It’s all to do with saving the hours of daylight, and was started by a man called William Willett, a London builder, who lived in Petts Wood in Kent (near our school).
William Willett first proposed the idea of British Summer Time in 1907 in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Waste of Daylight’. Willett had noticed that the summer mornings light was wasted while people slept, and that the time would be better utilised in the afternoon by putting the clocks forward. After campaigning for years the British Government finally adopted the system a year after Willett’s death.”
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this is all very interesting I am not really up to speed on gmt but living in scotland it is a way of life and when we put our clocks forward it makes me think of summer
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ann Donnelly, Jaamit Durrani. Jaamit Durrani said: RT @BeckyNaylor: remember that the clocks go forward tonight … http://bro.gs/cgat <- thanks for the reminder! [...]
We should keep GMT all year round, there is no longer any advantage to farmers which is the reason it was brought in during WW1