Workflow Date/Time variable is off by 4 hours

Question

I am using SharePoint Designer 2013 to write a workflow on SharePoint 2010.

My time zone is UTC-05:00 and that is the time zone in my site's regional settings. I have a list that has a look up from a calendar list. My workflow sends an email reminder about the calendar item. When I set a workflow variable to that current item's value, it stores a UTC-09:00

Set Variable: TrainingDay to Current Item:Appointment:Start Time
Log Calendar Current item: [%Current Item... to the workflow history list
Log Variable: TrainingDay to the workflow history list

Produces this output in the log and also in an email generated later in the workflow:

Calendar Current item: 2020-04-01 09:30:00

4/1/2020 5:30:00 AM

Four hours off in the UTC-09:00 time zone. Our servers are not in that time zone.

The variable, TrainingDay, is a Date/Time and I set it to the Current Item field return field as "Lookup Value (Date/Time)"

Answer 1

It is by design that Workflow local variables for Date/Time store value doesn’t go with the site regional settings and it cannot be changed for the time being.

In my test environment, the variable is using the time zone UTC +0. If I change the time zone under site regional settings to UTC, I will find these two values equal.