It is my (barely informed) understanding that summer is caused primarily by the larger amount of sunlight hitting that hemisphere during the season. So why is it that (in the northern hemisphere) July and August are so often hotter than June (I know it’s not always the case but usually).
Also why wouldn’t May, getting just as much direct sunlight per day as July, be as hot on average as July? Why is August even hot when the end of the month is getting close to the equinox?
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Let’s say you’re trying to fill a leaky bucket at a water tap.
As you turn the tap on to start filling the bucket, you slowly turn it more and more open, until it reaches its maximum flow rate, and then you slowly turn it back down until it’s off.
In the meantime, the bucket is slowly draining out water at a constant rate. Less than the tap can fill it at partial blast.
Now ask yourself: when is the water level in the bucket at its *highest*? Is it when you had the tap all the way open? Not necessarily. Even when you start turning the tap down, water is still flowing into the bucket faster than it leaves the bucket, so the water level continues to increase, even though the tap is getting weaker.
Only once the flow rate of the tap becomes equal to the flow rate of the leak does the bucket’s water level actually stop rising. And once the flow rate of the tap becomes less, the water level of the bucket starts to decrease again.
Heating the Earth is kind of similar; just instead of water filling a bucket from a tap, it’s heat energy warming up the Earth from the Sun. The maximum “fill level” of heat doesn’t arrive when the sunlight is at its maximum, it’s always increasing until the sunlight input starts to equal the output of the heat radiating away from Earth. That doesn’t start to happen until later into the summer.
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