Yes, time can be captured in UTC alone. Storing time in UTC and using UTC for transmitting date-time information is generally considered good practice. I suppose it’s up to each state of the US to define its time. And I don’t know, but I suppose that today they (officially or in practice) define time as an offset from UTC rather than GMT.
As other answers point out, the UTC date string with Z designator would indeed be successfully parsed, but it would also be converted to local time, i.e. it returns DateTime with a Kind of Local and adjusted timestamp. To always get UTC DateTime, one could use one of DateTime.Parse("2008-01-01 00:00:00Z", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal | DateTimeStyles ...
149 If your local date time is say Eastern Standard Time and you want to convert from UTC to that, then in Azure SQL and SQL Server 2016 and above, you can do:
sql - Convert Datetime column from UTC to local time in select ...
How can I get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java?
The time-zone offset is the difference, in minutes, between UTC and local time. Note that this means that the offset is positive if the local timezone is behind UTC and negative if it is ahead. For example, if your time zone is UTC+10 (Australian Eastern Standard Time), -600 will be returned.
Learn how to convert UTC date time to local date time with examples and solutions provided by the Stack Overflow community.
The resulting utc object isn't really a UTC date, but a local date shifted to match the UTC time (see comments). However, in practice it does the job. Update: The above answer from 2012 was a quick-and-dirty way to get the UTC date when calling utc.toString(), utc.toLocaleString(), etc. With advancements in JavaScript, better approaches exist ...