ELi5: This morning it is 22°. Yesterday morning, it was -3°. Why does temperature fluctuate more broadly in winter, as opposed to summer?
In: 4
It might only be that the shift is less noticeable in the summer.
Looking at average highs/lows for my area July has a 21° range, where as January has a 17° range.
The sun has less of an effect in the winter. Yesterday in MN, our high temperature occurred at 2 AM. So it’s all about fronts and wind shifts. Do we get the polar vortex or warm air from the Gulf of Mexico?
During summer you have sun, which provides lot of the heat to the hemisphere and hearts more since it is more direct. Once the ground and surrounding bodies of water are warm they act as radiators.
During winter you can get cold and hot masses of air rushing from even quite far away. Now since the ground and waters aren’t warm and the sun isn’t heating the mass of air it cools off.
Sun is really important when it comes to the temperature.
I have the opposite experience. Where I live the temperature has been betwen 3 and 8 degrees for weeks. In summer it easily goes up or down 15 degrees within a day.
The reason is that during winter the sunlight is less strong, so solar forcing on the temperature is less.
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