On Sunday, November 3, community members will need to turn back their clocks one hour as daylight saving’s comes to an end for 2024.
Daylight saving time is the time between March and November when most Americans adjust their clocks ahead by one hour.
Citizens will be gaining an hour in November (as opposed to losing an hour in the spring) to make for more daylight in the winter mornings. When the nation “springs forward” in March, it’s to add more daylight in the evenings.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox is Sunday, Sept. 22, marking the start of the fall season.
Not all states and U.S. territories participate in daylight saving time. Hawaii and most of Arizona do not observe daylight saving time.
Because of its desert climate, Arizona doesn’t follow daylight saving time (with the exception of the Navajo Nation).
After most of the U.S. adopted the Uniform Time Act, the state figured that there wasn’t a good reason to adjust clocks to make sunset occur an hour later during the hottest months of the year.
There are also five other U.S. territories that do not participate: - American Samoa -Guam - Northern Mariana Islands - Puerto Rico - U.S. Virgin Islands The Navajo Nation, located in parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, does follow daylight saving time.
Hawaii does not observe daylight saving time because of its proximity to the equator, there is not a lot of variance between hours of daylight during the year.
Daylight saving time became established law in the U.S. in 1918 with the passage of the Standard Time Act, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s astronomical applications department.
The time change was implemented as a way to maximize daylight hours to help save on energy consumption during World War I.
Over the next several decades, legislators made unsuccessful efforts to repeal daylight saving time nationally, and some individual states and cities reverted to non-daylight saving time hours.
In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which established a uniform daylight saving time throughout the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the federal agency that oversees time zones.
Under the Uniform Time Act of 1966, states that observe daylight saving time must follow the federally-mandated start and end dates.
States may also “exempt themselves from observing daylight saving time by state law,” according to the DOT.
In 2022, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would have made daylight saving time permanent across the U.S., however, the legislation was never brought to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.