Our winters are dreary, but could be worse

‘Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December ...”

Or maybe it was January. No, February. Probably March.

Edgar Allan Poe might have discerned the nuances of winter months, but here in Ohio we tread water — 40-degree, dirty dishwater — from Nov. 1 to April 15. The days and months smudge into a raw, drizzly blur. “Fifty Shades of Grey?” More like 500 shades of gray in these parts.

After recent days dragged into weeks without a flicker of sunlight or glimpse of blue sky, I went hunting to confirm that Columbus must be among the gloomiest winter cities in the U.S.

“The grayest cities in America,” declared the headline in American City & County magazine.

I scrolled to the bottom for the list. I saw Pittsburgh at No. 1 and Buffalo at No. 3, both fine cities but certainly candidates for winter gloom. But what was Tampa doing at No. 2 and Miami at No. 4, just above Cleveland?

Wrong type of gray, it turned out. The magazine was basing its list on reporting by Forbes about the aging of America’s cities.

Fine-tuning my search for “cloudiest,” “gloomiest,” and “dreariest” American cities turned up some usual suspects. Buffalo and Cleveland, it seems, are grayer in more ways than one.

The internet loves its lists, and there are plenty out there that suggest that Ohio in winter is a bleak affair. The science and weather site Current Results found that Columbus ranked seventh in terms of winter days with heavy cloud cover.

The percentage of cloudy winter days here was 67%, which right about now feels like a gross miscalculation. Maybe the numbers were transposed. But at least we were still behind Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

In 2015, an Alaskan climatologist named Brian Brettschneider came up with a Dreariness Index, which attempted to pinpoint the dreariest parts of the U.S. It doesn’t appear that he ever updated his findings, so we’ll be forced to use his old data, which nevertheless confirmed that we live inside a mop bucket that someone forgot to empty.

Brettschneider ranked Columbus as a 24 out of a possible 30 on the Dreariness Index. Seven major cities were drearier. Care to guess three of them?

Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cleveland might be getting a bad rap in these lists, but Brettschneider pointed out that dreariness is in the eye, and mind, of the beholder. He defined dreary as wet and cloudy, so he relied on total precipitation, the number of wet days, and cloudiness to calculate the index. Temperature, for instance, was not part of his calculations.

As a result, parts of only three states scored maximum dreariness: northwestern Washington, southeastern Alaska, and windward Hawaii.

So there, at least, is a bit of relief.

If this unrelenting gloom has got us down, we can tell ourselves that, according to science, things could be much worse.

We could be stuck in Hawaii.

What a hellhole.