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Time Zone

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: