why is the dessert so hot in the morning and freazing in the night ?
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Quick tip to remember how to spell desert and dessert. You only want to spend one day in the desert (spelled with one “s”), and you always want two desserts (spelled with two “s”).
As far as your question, this is basically explained by the severe lack of moisture. Higher moisture contents do two things, partially block the sun’s rays and can trap warm air at the surface. Deserts receive a much higher amount of sunlight than areas with higher humidity, this causing higher temps. Once the sun goes down, there is no moisture to help trap any of that warm air from the daytime so it is circulated away from the surface and is replaced by colder air. Not sure where you live, but where I am is fairly temperate and I live near the coast, so there is much more humidity. Let’s say in this area we have a day during the summer where between the hours of 8am-7pm, we have completely clear skies. This is going to allow for the maximum amount of sunlight to reach the surface and re-radiate back from the ground as heat. You will see a temperature spike while the sun is out, and for example let’s say it reaches 90F. Now if sunset is at 730pm, and we suddenly have lots of clouds roll in just before it at 7pm, we will have overcast skies just as the sun is setting. Even though the sun is no longer providing heat at this point, the warm air that was produced during daylight with no clouds will actually get trapped at the surface by the overcast conditions that have set up at sunset. Those warm temperatures will stick around until the clouds clear, maybe dropping a couple of degrees through the night. So if it were 90F at it’s maximum temperature, you may only see the temperature drop to 80-85F at best. However if in that scenario we never had those clouds roll in at night, the temperature would probably drop closer to 65-70F.
This also works in the opposite way. If you have overcast conditions while the sun is out, it will block the majority of the sun’s rays that will not allow it to heat up very much, let’s say to 70F. Now if when the sun sets, those clouds all clear up, any of the heat that is currently at the surface will circulate out and the temperature will drop at night, maybe between 55F-60F. This is the same concept that allows for greater temperature variations in the desert as opposed to areas with higher humidity. Hope this helps!
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