There’s a really bright spot in Michigan’s dry September

You may feel like you've been squinting a lot this month, and you're right.

The National Weather Service office in Grand Rapids actually has a weather instrument that measures the minutes of sunshine in a day. It's the only NWS office in the state that counts sunshine amounts. In fact, since the National Weather Service offices across the country have abandoned their sunshine gathering instruments, we only get good sunshine data from a few cities in the U.S.

It has been a very sunny September. In fact it looks like the official data at Grand Rapids has us pacing toward the sunniest September on record.

The National Weather Service office at Grand Rapids is reporting 83 percent of total possible sunshine for this September. Of course this makes sense when we are working on one of the top-five driest Septembers on record .

Now we do have a rain or two on the way today/tonight and Tuesday. This rain should amount to enough to take us just out of a top-five driest September. It will also lower our total sunshine minutes some.

The long-term average amount of total sunshine for September in Grand Rapids is 58 percent. The most sunshine recorded in any September at Grand Rapids was 81 percent back in 2004.

The Grand Rapids sunshine data actually goes way back to 1904.

This week will have some cloudiness today obviously, Tuesday and maybe in the last two days of the month. So it's hard to tell if we will have the sunniest September on record. My thought is the cloudiness this week will probably knock us back to the second or third sunniest September. The second sunniest September had 77 percent of total possible sunshine minutes.

It's a rare conversation when we are talking about a lot of sunshine in Michigan.