Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
Note Zulu Time (mission time) is equal to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) everywhere in the world.
GMT observes daylight savings as it is in Greenwich England, this is not consistent between countries. UTC does not observe daylight savings.
Er, not sure if I understand you but In Greenwich we use GMT in winter and BST in summer so GMT doesn’t change.
Different countries that observe DTS pick different days to do the switches. Also the closer to the equator you wre the higher likelyhood they dont observe it at all.
The point is that GMT isn’t changing, the region is switching to an entirely different time zone, BST (British Summer Time). If your time is based on GMT, it won’t change due to British daylight saving time because GMT never changes.
For a similar example, in the part of the US that uses Mountain Time, states observe MST (Mountain Standard Time) in the winter, and most switch to MDT (Mountain Daylight Time) in the summer. However, Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time, so they remain on MST. MST always stays the same (GMT-7), the time is only changing because the states are observing a different time zone. The same happens with GMT and BST, it’s just harder to see because you can’t pick out areas that remain on GMT all year.
But in Europe we don’t say German Mean Time or Spanish Mean Time when changing to summer time. We increment GMT+1. So it becomes GMT+2. Then we revert back to GMT+1 in winter.
Incorrect - GMT is a timezone which the UK (and some other countries) observe in winter. In summer, the UK observes BST.
Good explanation here: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html
Thank you for the correction and the reference. The only time I can think of where these sort of distinction would come into play anyway would be if you asked a person in London the time from somewhere else vs. looking it up on a website. I dont exactly have any UK friends I call to look at clocks for me.
All time should work this way. 24 hr time running on GMT.
If someone in Cali wakes up at 1600, the only thing they change is their clocks and calendars, once.
We do all base our time off GMT +/- whatever your timezone is.