- Time Zone
- A North-South strip along the surface of the Earth which uses the same time
standard, where notionally at 12
noon the sun is at its highest point in the sky.
The Earth is divided into 24 time zones and within each time zone the same time standard is used (i.e. all the clocks in a given time zone should agree). Each time zone is roughly 15 degrees wide, but there are some variations because time zones are often bounded by country or administrative borders and it is often easier to follow these borders than the strict 15 degree boundary.
Time zones are defined by the number of hours difference from UTC:
UTC Offset Abbreviation Full Name Used Where UTC - 12 Eniwetok, Kwajalein UTC - 11 Midway Island, Somoa UTC - 10 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time Hawaii UTC - 9 AKST Alaska Standard Time Alaska UTC - 8 AKDT Alaska Daylight Time Alaska UTC - 8 PST Pacific Standard Time West coast of America and Canada UTC - 7 Arizona UTC - 7 Mountain Time America and Canada UTC - 6 Central America, Mexico City UTC - 6 CST Central Standard Time America and Canada UTC - 5 Bogota, Lima, Quito, East Indiana UTC - 5 EST Eastern Standard Time East coast of America and Canada UTC - 4 Atlantic Time Canada UTC - 4 Caracas, La Paz, Santiago UTC - 3 Newfoundland, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Georgetown, Greenland UTC - 2 Mid-Atlantic UTC -1 Azores, Cape Verde Islands UTC UTC Coordinated Universal Time London UTC GMT Greenwich Meridian Time London UTC London, Casablanca, Monrovia UTC + 1 BST British Summer Time London UTC + 1 Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna, Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague, Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofija, Vilnius, Warsaw, Zagreb, West Central Africa. UTC + 2 CEST Athens, Istanbul, Minsk, Bucharest, Cairo, Harare, Pretoria, Helsinki, Riga, Tallinn, Jerusalem UTC + 3 Baghdad, Kuwait, Riyadh, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Nairobi UTC + 4 Abu Dhabi, Muscat, Baku, Tbilisi, Yerevan UTC + 5 Ekaterinburg, Islamabad, Karachi, Tashkent UTC + 6 Almaty, Novosibirsk, Astana, Dhaka UTC + 7 Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta, Krasnoyarsk UTC + 8 Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi, Irkutsk, Ulaan Bataar, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Perth, Taipei UTC + 9 Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo, Seoul, Yakutsk UTC + 10 Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Guam, Port Moresby, Hobart, Vladivostok UTC + 11 Magadan, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia UTC + 12 Auckland, Wellington, Fiji, Kamchatka, Marshall Islands UTC + 13 Muku'alofa
As a further complication some countries observe daylight saving, which means that their local time is adjusted by one or two hours at certain times of the year to make best use of the available daylight.
For more information see: