Just something that interested me. I live in an area that dropped from the 60s to the 40s in one night, and, two weeks later, rose back into the 60s, again, literally overnight. How does this happen?
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This isn’t an answer and may get deleted, but, in parts of the US Midwest, temperature can change dramatically in the period of just a few minutes, with the record being 49 degrees Fahrenheit in 2 minutes: https://weather.com/sports-recreation/ski/news/5-extreme-temperature-drops-20130118
It might be a better question to ask how temperatures manage to stay *stable* enough from day to night to day again. Temperature can range from -459 degrees Fahrenheit at absolute zero to 28,800,000 degrees Fahrenheit at the center of the Sun. When you think about it that way, a difference of 20 degrees Fahrenheit isn’t anything at all. You can see a swing of maybe 100 degrees between day and night in the desert regions of Earth, and much more than that on other planets in our solar system.
It is such a small range of temperature that we consider to be habitable, let alone comfortable, and it’s amazing that our climate can keep it that way, thanks to our atmosphere and ocean currents.
The sun radiates energy in infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. Radiant energy from the sun heats the atmosphere, the oceans and the ground.
Most of these answers are missing the key factor – weather and in particular temperature is not something that belongs to one place, weather patterns move. Temperature can be driven by the temperature of the air – and the air moves. If it is 60 degrees F and suddenly a colder air mass moves in and pushes the warm air away, the temperature at that location will fall to the temperature of the new air mass. Most extreme rapid swings are a result of hotter or colder masses of air displacing an existing weather pattern.
One example of this is the Polar Vortex weather patterns in the Midwest US where the cold air from the poles dipped down and covered the midwest due to changes in the atmosphere like the jet stream moving etc.
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