A few rocky islands in the eastern Atlantic offer a landsman's perch from which to watch the eclipse as it speeds to Africa. The islands are located under a strong and permanent high pressure anticyclone, but skies are anything but clear in the humid air. Santa Maria Island shows only a 15% frequency of scattered cloud at eclipse time. Clear skies have a frequency of zero! However, this altogether dismal statistic may not be entirely representative of the eclipse prospects. Oceanic islands often have a considerable variation in cloudiness between leeward and windward sides. In this case the improvement is probably meager. Table 15 shows that none of the sites in the Azores have promising statistics.
Next section