Sun Behind Large Cloud Emoji

The sun behind large cloud emoji (🌥️) shows the sun mostly swallowed by a dominant cloud. It's the pessimistic sibling of 🌤️ (mostly sunny), same two elements, inverted ratio. Where 🌤️ says "today is going to be nice," 🌥️ says "bring a jacket, the sun's trying but the cloud is winning."

Meteorologically this is "mostly cloudy," defined by the U.S. National Weather Service as 5/8 to 7/8 opaque cloud cover (62.5-87.5%). It's the forecast that describes roughly half of all British days, most of Reykjavík's year, and the baseline weather across the North Pacific storm belt. Not rainy, not dark, just persistently gray with occasional brightness.

Approved in Unicode 7.0 (2014) as U+1F325U+1F325 WHITE SUN BEHIND CLOUD, shipping alongside 🌤️ and four other weather characters to fill the gap between ⛅ and ☁️. The "white sun" is a Unicode naming convention inherited from early symbol fonts, no modern platform actually renders the sun white.

Emotionally, 🌥️ sits in the gray zone: subdued, meh, faintly gloomy but not despairing. "Feeling 🌥️ today" is emotionally more honest than 😊 or 😢. It's the mood of most weekdays.

🌥️ is one of the least independently-posted weather emojis because the weather it represents is aggressively average. Nobody captions a photo with "another gorgeous mostly-cloudy day." When it shows up, it's usually doing one of four jobs.

Literal forecasts. "🌥️ today, might clear up later." Weather apps use 🌥️ specifically for their mostly-cloudy state, and it shows up in push notifications for millions of users in the UK, Ireland, Iceland, the Pacific Northwest, and northern Europe.

British weather humor. "Lovely day 🌥️" said ironically under gray London skies is peak British dry comedy. London gets ~1,481-1,633 hours of sunshine a year, roughly half of daylight; Manchester gets 1,200. 🌥️ is effectively the UK's national weather.

Mood metaphors. "Feeling 🌥️" communicates something specific: not depressed, not fine, somewhere in the middle. It's useful for honest emotional check-ins that don't want to claim either extreme.

Nordic and Scottish content. Reykjavík (1,300 sunshine hours), Tórshavn (840 hours), Glasgow (~1,203 hours), 🌥️ gets adopted by creators in cloudy cities as shorthand for "yes, this is what it looks like here, all the time."

Before Unicode 7.0 (June 2014), the emoji weather gradient had a problem: nothing between ⛅ and ☁️. You couldn't distinguish "overcast with breaks" from "fully gray." Weather apps had no icon for the most common British/Nordic/Pacific forecast state.

🌥️ shipped with five siblings (🌤️🌦️🌧️🌨️🌩️) to complete the progression. The name "WHITE SUN BEHIND CLOUD" comes from the naming convention for the 2014 weather additions, which paired each new character with the older ☀️ "BLACK SUN WITH RAYS" symbol font lineage. The sun in all modern renders is yellow, not white; the name is purely historical.

🌥️ is probably the least-used weather emoji in the five-point gradient because it occupies an emotionally flat niche: not pretty enough to post, not dramatic enough to complain about, but it's the one weather apps quietly use more than any other in northern latitudes.

• •Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands gets just 840 hours of sunshine per year. The cloudiest city on record is Totoró, Colombia, with about 637 hours, less than a month of clear weather spread across 365 days. 🌥️ would be an understatement.
• •London averages 1,481 hours of sunshine per year, Manchester 1,200, and Glasgow 1,203. Phoenix, Arizona gets 3,872 hours. 🌥️ is effectively the UK's national weather emoji.
• •The precise meteorological definition of 'mostly cloudy' is 5/8 to 7/8 opaque cloud cover (62.5-87.5%). Above 7/8 is 'cloudy,' above 95% is 'overcast.' 🌥️ sits in the narrow window where the sun is still visible but not winning.
• •Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) affects about 5% of U.S. adults, 8.9% in Alaska, 9.5% in northern Finland, and, per a 2007 survey, up to 20% of people in Ireland. Higher latitudes and more cloud cover are both associated with higher prevalence.
• •Runners, hikers, and photographers often prefer 🌥️ weather to ☀️. Cloud cover reduces UV, lowers ground temperature, eliminates harsh shadows, and extends the effective 'good light' window for portraits. Overcast skies are a natural softbox.
• •The five sun-and-cloud emojis (☀️🌤️⛅🌥️☁️) were designed as a deliberate gradient when Unicode 7.0 shipped in 2014. Before that, weather apps had no way to show the difference between 'mostly sunny' and 'mostly cloudy' in emoji, just one unspecific ⛅.
• •The name 'WHITE SUN BEHIND CLOUD' is a Unicode naming artifact. It pairs with ☀️ 'BLACK SUN WITH RAYS,' a convention from early black-and-white symbol fonts where 'black' meant filled and 'white' meant outlined. Every modern emoji renders the sun yellow.