March 2020 Saint-Barthélemy — Good news, there is a new feature on the Xavier David website that should help anyone wondering the current local time and weather of St Barts. Looking closely in the upper right hand corner of xavierdavid.fr, one will now find time, temperature (both Fahrenheit and Celsius), and an icon indicating approximate weather condition (sunny, cloudy, rainy, etc.) in St Barts.
Fortunately, St Barts is blessed with consistently pleasant weather, typically warm & sunny. Anybody could probably guess the approximate local conditions here. But what about the local time on St Barts ? If you are not actually here, the time can quickly become confusing.
Although useful for anyone who might be curious, the clock feature should be especially helpful for anybody (such as clients or collaborators of Bureau Xavier David) who needs to coordinate their activities with St Barts from afar. Given the various different timezones and the vagaries of Daylight Saving Time (with differences between the North American and European versions), it can be easy to become confused and miss an important conference telephone call.
As a reminder, St Barts is located in the Atlantic Standard Timezone (UTC −4:00) which places it one hour ahead of New York’s Eastern Standard Time (UTC −5:00) and five hours behind Paris’ Central European Time (UTC +1:00). For further reference, St Barts is four hours ahead of Los Angeles’ Pacific Standard Time (UTC −8:00) and four hours behind London’s Greenwich Mean Time (UTC ±0:00).
Moreover, given the island’s location in the tropics relatively near the equator, St Barts does not experience the drastic changes in daylight hours throughout the year that are typical in northern cities like Paris or New York. Consequently, St Barts does not participate in Daylight Saving Time. In other words, during winter St Barts is an hour ahead of New York but during summer they are both on the same time. Similarly, this applies to other cities too such at Paris, London, etc. And, of course, cities in the southern hemisphere (e.g., Buenos Aires, Sydney, etc.) would have the reverse seasonal discrepancy with respect to Daylight Savings Time.
Finally, as an additional wrinkle, the Daylight Savings Time programs of North America and Europe no longer follow the same calendar as the United States expanded their Daylight Saving Time in 2007 but Europe did not follow suit. For example, this year of 2020 the clocks will "spring ahead" one hour on Sunday, March 8th in the United States but mainland France will wait until Sunday, March 29th.
As all of that can be rather confusing to keep track of, please rest assured that the local time of St Barts will remain conveniently available at xavierdavid.fr as a trusted source to answer the question: What time is it in St Barts right now?
