Solar Energy at Williams, why winter thermals are weak

[Kempton]

I stumbled on this, from WeatherSpark:
https://weatherspark.com/y/653/Avera...tes-Year-Round

enter any location you like at the top. There's all kinds of weather data here on a big picture, annual basis, like the solar energy over the year at Williams:



I'd been looking for a reference like this with numbers to show the diff btwn winter energy and summer energy as to why the thermals as so weak. I mean of course we know this, but to have some numbers against it is nice. A 4x diff between the weakest winter solar day and the strongest summer day!

[RamyYanetz]

True and interesting data. Worth mentioning though that instability is obviously the other factor. If we had the same solar energy of the summer and instability of the winter we will end up with thunderstorms as we experienced over the Diablo Range this weekend so we can still find strong thermals during the winter on very unstable days even with the low solar energy, the problem is that most of those days and up with very low bases and rain showers and have short window of soaring conditions.

Ramy