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Huh, don't know why I didn't figure it out until now. I kept thinking that since sunrise and sunset is basically the same thing in reverse, the temperature during those times should be pretty much the same. But the water analogy really makes sense. Water takes time to boil and freeze, and the Earth takes time to heat and cool.
I know of three ways to define the seasons. For example spring: Astronomical: Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice. Meteorological, March, April, May. Phenological: It's spring when nature wakes up and it looks like spring.
Yup. And by the last definition "spring" travels through Europe from Portugal to Norway. It's a weird definition with a funny inference: the start of spring is kind of a wave then xD
Yeah, then one day you wake up and find those trees that were covered in nice flowers are now covered in snow or frost. At least where I live, the temperatures down just start to rise. They rise, then fall, you wait for months to get a bit of warmth and then you get a heat wave that just burns everything and stepping outside is like going into an oven.
Seasons used to be divided up as half way between the equinox and solstice. Halloween being the start of winter. Winter ending in early Feb. May day being the start of Summer. And summer ending with the agricultural festival Lammas in early August.
It should be noted that some cultures, such as China, consider the solstices and equinoxes to be the midpoints of the seasons, not the starts. So the Chinese season called 冬, usually translated as Winter, runs from about November 7 to about February 4.
And in Norway we consider the entire month that a solstice or an equinox falls in to belong to the season that Americans think starts at that solstice or equinox, so the typical winter months are December, January and February.
Over here in India, we have 6 seasons each two months long- Jan-Feb Winter (Shishir) Mar-Apr Spring (Vasant) May-Jun Summer (Grishma) Jul-Aug Monsoon (Varsha) Sep-Oct Autumn (Sharad) Nov-Dec Pre Winter (Hemant)
In Kerala (which is very close to the equator), only two seasons are usually recognized - summer season and rainy season. There's a bit of overlap between the two.
I have a personal anecdote. Lake Michigan is utterly freezing all summer and only gets warm enough to swim in late August, right before the air temperature begins to drop.
We do use temperature for seasons. At least here in Sweden, the official definition for seasons is based on the average temperature over a 24 hour period.
these national classifications are decided by your country's bureau of meterology (or the swedish equivalent). As such, they define the metereological seasons - based on weather (and thus, temperature) whereas kate is talking about astronomical seasons - defined by the movement of the earth (based on astronomy!), and thus, daylight hours. hope this clears things up!
@@stolenshortsword Agreed. However it seemed to me that the vide implied that most people make use of astronomical seasons. I think almost no one uses those.
As far as I remember it's actually average temperature of 7 24 hour periods in a row that starts a new season. With winter defined as below 0 C and summer above 10 C. So 7 days of -2 C makes it winter but another 4 days of 11 C still means it is winter despite summer being defined as temperatures above 10 C. But it is mostly Summer and Winter that is defined this way, spring and autumn just exists in the gap between them. It's kinda funny actually, I live in the north and our winter started at least a month ago maybe 2, and only couple weeks ago the radio ads started for winter tires. At that point we had had at least 2 feet of snowfall. But I guess the south finally nears winter.
@@VorpalGun I agree! I don't know anyone who uses astronomical seasons. Not the ones she spoke about at least. If I were to define seasons by calendar I would have said winter started in December, even though based on daylight it would be closer to say it starts in January.
How you define "opposite" matters. If you consider the the night and day portions, you can use the graph to see an "opposite" symmetry between winter and summer. Take that graph section representing winter, rotate it 180-degrees and slide it over to the summer segment. Night in the winter lines up with day in the summer.
Fall feeling sooo much different from spring, despite having similar temperature, because the day ia so much shorter, is such a great explanation. I mean I kinda knew it all of those things but I didn't really connect that the daylight difference is _the thing_ that breaks the symmetry between autumn and spring. Aside from, the changes in vegetation and the knowledge of what lies ahead.
The way I think about it, in spring the air is warming up but the ground is still frozen, in autumn the air has a cold bite but the ground is still warm.
What breaks the symmetry is the same what causes the delay between the graphs of sunlight hours and temperature. This delay is caused by the heat capacity of the earth, mostly that from its plenty water: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity
I always thought it was weird that the shortest and longest days were the beginning of winter/summer. I always felt like they should be in the middle, precisely because of as the video mentioned it feels like summer and winter are the two opposite endpoints.
I haven't given this much thought before I started growing vegetables on my balcony. Which made me realize that growing season for many plants starts in spring when it's still pretty cold, because it's the daylight and not the temperature that's the deciding factor. As long as there are no longer frosts during nights.
In Australia, the first of December is the first day of summer, the first day of March is the first day of autumn, the first day of June is the first day of winter, and the first day of Sepetember is the first day of spring. This makes more sense, as the equinox/solcist is in the middle of the season
This is pretty much how my household counts seasons, except that we live in America so the months are reversed: winter begins with December, spring begins with February - we live in California so we count there as being less winter and more spring - summer begins with June and fall begins with September. This leaves us with 2 months of winter (December and January), 4 months of spring (February, March, April, and May), 3 months of summer (June, July, and August) and 3 months of fall (September, October, and November), which ends up feeling pretty true to nature, at least where we live.
Spring - March, April and May Summer - June, July and August Autumn - September, October and November Winter - December, January and February I was already taught this in kindergarten and it matches the seasons in Europe pretty well. I've always been confused why many people shift the seasons 20 days or so forward.
Where I live we were taught the same but the solstice and equinox definitions line up pretty well So spring is actually mostly April may and June Summer is July august and September Autumn is October November December and winter is January February march
The March is the first month of spring. The first day of astronomical spring is at 21st of March. Both of those ideas float in some cultures simonteniously (this word is not possible to spell) without any contradictions between them. It’s a bit weird. In March it’s already sometimes warm and somewhat bright.
Australia uses the same system to align seasons with the months, but in reverse because it’s in the Southern Hemisphere. Summer - December, January, February. Autumn - March, April, May Winter - June, July, August Spring - September, October, November
Good explanation, but keep in mind it only works when living in medium latitudes. In tropical areas, equinoxes and solstices still happen, but there's often little to no differences in temperatures. And in polar regions summer is very short and the rest of the year is dark and cold.
The video very clearly defined the seasons by the solstices and equinoxes, not by temperature. Summer is always 3 months long with that definition, as are winter, spring and fall. What the video did badly is telling us that using temperature is intuitive but wrong. It isn't wrong to use temperature, it is an alternative not used where the writer of the video live. I live in Sweden and we use meteorological definitions, making temperature the primary thing used to define seasons. We have 4 seasons. Summer is longer in the south than in the north.
It's called seasonal lag, and the same thing happens in a daily basis (that is, the lowest temperatures happening right before sunrise and the highest happening after noon). And yes, temperature might not be as consistent as daylight, but we can always use the average temperatures of the last 10 or 20 years. And climatologists actually do. Summer is considered to be the three warmest months (June, July and August) and Winter is the three coldest (December, January and February). This may not be the case for all places on earth, but it is for the vast majority of them.
@@______608 EXACTLY LOL, how come "this is the vast majority of them"? They either completely forgot about the south hemisphere or they were talking about climatologists using the 3 hotter and 3 colder months...
@@gabrielxavier2676 Yep, I forgot about the southern hemisphere, and the worst thing of all is that I happen to live in the southern hemisphere. I made that comment 5 months ago so maybe I decided to describe the northern hemisphere for simplicity.
As someone whose birthday is this shortest day, this is a fact of life that I’m always thankful for- that I don’t gotta celebrate my birthday in literal ice
Well, China and the Celts, along with other cultures do follow the temperature level, which is why we have our Mid-Autumn Festival (Mooncake fest) around September Equinox. While the Romans and Greeks and then the Western world adopted the sunlight based pattern. Perhaps the massive landmass of places like China or Central Europe made temperature increase and decrease quickly, unlike the City of Rome which is surrounded by water, and water is better in retaining heat which is why it takes longer for the seasons in Italy to change from hot to cold.
Mind blown. I was just thinking about how fall is overall actually warmer then spring and a a couple of months about how the hot part of the summer is actually the at the end of the long days with less day time. I always keep waiting for it to get warmer in spring and it takes forever, and feels like winter takes forever to start after fall.. now I have it neatly organized in my head!
Straight up. Where I grew up in South Florida, November was when the heat finally broke, but it didn't get _"cold"_ (~40°F) until January and March was the inverse of November.
What I’ve never understood is this: In central Texas, our average coldest day is about three weeks after the winter solstice, but our average hottest day is about seven weeks after the summer solstice. I’m sure there’s some good meteorological reason for it, but it’s always baffled me why the average coldest and hottest days aren’t the same length of time after the solstices. My guess is that our "winters" are so much shorter than our summers, so the length of time it takes to start to warm up again after the solstice is shorter, which moves the average coldest day closer to the solstice. That’s a completely uneducated guess, however. If I ever run into a meteorologist somewhere, that’s the first question I’ll ask.
I don't know the reason for specific areas, but changes in wind direction and/or solar radiation likely play a part. It seems in the south-west of the US late-spring and early-summer are sunnier than mid-summer, so temperature peaks earlier. In the south-east late-summer is sunnier, so temperature peaks later. I don't know exactly about winter. Especially in the western half of the US the lowest temperatures occur at or slightly after the shortest day, but in the eastern half it's closer to mid-winter, as in Europe for example. It likely has to do with changes in wind direction, but I don't know the exact mechanism.
I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure it's typical for it to take longer to warm up than to cool down (seasonwise). Maybe it's because coldness is simply lack of warmth idk.
This is also the reason why it feels hotter during the evening (4~5pm-ish) than at noon. There's more heat raining down from above at noon but it's only a few hours after that the earth begins to radiate back the heat it stored out of the ground; adding more heat overall
I've grown up with metrological definition of seasons, where the boundaries between seasons are defined by the actual temperatures that happened this year. That means that we sometimes skip a season, since the conditions were never fulfilled.
3 роки тому+4
Now I understand why January and February always felt brighter than December.
March is still considered winter here. From late March till mid April, the raining season starts. Then from mid April till early June is spring. I live in Almaty anyway & in the capital Astana, sometimes April is still snowing
It’s all a thing of perspectives really, you could also argue that summer/winter and spring/autumn are mirror images with the day/night durations switched the same way you can argue that spring/summer and autumn/winter are mirrored but with the same day/night distribution
@@piotrrywczak That’s not true exactly. It’s kinda like how point symmetry and axial symmetry are both forms of symmetry but also symmetrical in a way the other one isn’t (with some overlapping conditions)
If fall is symmetrical to something then there exists a season which mirrors fall. There is no such season. Winter doesn’t mirror temperature. Spring doesn’t mirror day time.
Actually I'd argue the daylight graph explains a lot of how we experience spring and fall. As soon as I saw it, my response was that this was a great illustration and made a lot of sense.
It's more complicated than that. The thermal capacity of the soil isn't that big, it would cause the temperature lag of maybe one week, not 6 weeks as it is in reality. The biggest reason for the delay is the atmospheric processes and movements. The simplest way to explain it, in the Northen Hemisphere we shoud've had the temperature starting to increase in February, but because the Arctic starts to get some daylight, the air there starts to move and we all here have a lot of cold northern Arctic winds instead.
I think you made a mistake at 1:00. You mirror the image in the X-axis (horizontally), and say that summer is spring in reverse. This is true, when only looking at daylight times. However, if you flipped the image of spring in the Y-axis (vertically), you'd get that spring equals fall. It's just that what used to be night is now day, and vice versa. So spring and summer are each others' **reverse,** but spring and fall still are each others' **opposites** :)
I have this theory that the reason that people get grumpy around this time of year is because the rate of change of day length (which is the derivative of length of day (i.e. cos(x) -> sin (x) is highest in mid autumn. I don't have any evidence for this but nor have I ever seen any research sugesting it isn't true and there's certainly anecdotal evidence people find mid autumn a particularly stresful time.
It's like turning off an induction stove, the heat source is turned off, or lowered, but heat is still transferring to the pot from the element to the pot because the element is still hotter than the pot, which increases the temperature of the pot for a few moments after being turned off. Now to watch the video.
Over here, we talk about metrological seasons, which are pretty much based on temperature. And that do lag compared to regular seasons. In fact, lately it has lagged a lot. But is a thing here.
As someone who lives in a country witho no seasons, I was surprised when I learned that solstices an equinoxes are the start of the seasons and not their midpoints
If you use the solar system they are in the midpoint. Astrological they are at the start and metrological fits neatly into months with December January and February being in spring ext. If you don't have seasons I'm assuming you live quite close to the equator. What do you think about the daylight differences between summer and spring that we get on the UK or further north?
I knew this information years ago when I was shocked when I knew that: The Sun is closer to the Earth during winter for the Northern Hemisphere :) and I wondered what determines the temperature?
"Why don't we just use temperature to divide up the four seasons?" Speak for yourself. I use temperature. I do not acknowledge the legitimacy of any seasonal division that puts the beginning of each season any later than the 7th of the month that contains the solstice / equinox. And I'm hardly the only one; the traditional English names for the summer and winter solstices are Midsummer and Midwinter. (And OKAY maybe part of the reason I will die on this hill is that my birthday is in mid-September and I flat REFUSE to have a summer birthday because I DESPISE summer BUT WHATEVER)
The video quite clumsily used master suppression techniques. It said that one thing is correct and another is wrong, even if a lot of nations actually use the thing that is "wrong". The video should have stated that astronomical definition is a common thing, not the only thing. It should then also have stated that the temperature is an alternative, but is not part of the astronomical definition. As is, it says using temperature is just wrong.
This is also the reason why the hottest time of day is usually around 3pm instead of noon, and the coldest part of the day is around 3am instead of midnight!
On this subject, I've always wondered why an increased amount of light in the past makes the present hotter but a decreased amount of light in the future doesn't make the present colder. But the objects are affected by the temperature of close objects equally in all directions of the 3 spatial axis
There is only the present. Past and Future are only concepts in our minds. But with the difference that past times already have happened, e.g. were at some point the present and "real", e.g. did already have an effect. The future is only a prediction what could happen. The past actually did happen.
But it kinda does? If you have a lower temperature in the future then the present temperature will go down. With time. However there is no causality in that. Obviously. Because the temperature is going down now for whatever reason, the temperature in the future will be lower. At some point when thinking about physical systems you need to take into consideration the arrow of time ;P Like. Black Body Radiation doesn’t generate photons from an arbitrarily far away point in space to then fly towards the black body and be absorbed by it. The photons originating at the surface of the body are emitted into space and carry the energy away. Funnily enough, if the universe was uniformly hot and dense it kinda wouldn’t matter.
She literally started the video with “if you live in the northern hemisphere” which most viewers do. It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to flip the hot and cold seasons
@@DanS044 lol no she didn't, instead she used terms like '4 season folk' which can also refer to people in the southern hemisphere. She only specified the north pole for the graph that represented seasons relative to specific calendar days.
The Swedish Meteoroligical and Hydrological Institute defines the start of seasons as when the daily mean temeperature consistently is above/below certain temperatures. Spring when daily mean temperature is above freezing for 7 consecutive days, summer when daily mean temperature is above 10C/50F for 5 consecutive days, fall when daily mean temperature is below 10C/50F for 5 consecutive days and winter when daily mean temperature is below freezing for 5 consecutive days.
The warmest days of the year isn’t on midsummer day either. The traditional summer half of the year in Norway starts on the 14th of April, and the winter half starts on the 14th of October. And in the modern calendar we consider December, January and February (with January typically being the coldest) the winter months, March, April and May make up spring, June, July and August are summer (with July tending to be warmest), and September, October and November are autumn.
Equator earthlings can't relate. Where we live it's always 12h day/12h night, hot and humid 365 days a year. Well, some months are usually rainier than the others but we're all kinda fed up with the sun to the point that it's baffling to see 4-season earthling would blissfully lie down in the sun around any body of water every time the weather is reasonably sunny.
i like how you guys explain things, it helps me find a way to explain to my nephew at least until he learns enough english to watch these videos himself
How well does that temperature cycle line up with the midpoint of the official seasons around the world? Where does it actually end up like that? Which places reach their peak much closer to the peak daylight? Are there any places which lag behind by even more than 1/8th of a year?
This phenomenon - called "seasonal lag" - is really interesting! The amount of lag in different places can be very different (due to factors like proximity to water, latitude, etc) and can be different in different seasons (for example, San Francisco has an extremely long lag in summer/fall, but almost no lag in winter/spring).
Canada actually has 11 seasons: Winter Joke Spring Second Winter Fool's Spring Third Winter Mud Season Actual Spring Summer False Fall Second Summer (1 week) Actual Fall
Seasons used to be divided up as half way between the equinox and solstice. Halloween being the start of winter. Winter ending in early Feb. May day being the start of Summer. And summer ending with the agricultural festival Lammas in early August. Australia and New Zealand divide seasons on months. With 1 Dec being the start of summer and 1 June being the start of winter.
It's actually more of a gyroscopic precession type of thing. Once days get to a certain length, the overall energy input for a day is greater than the output, thus increasing the temperature. That starts in spring and ends near the end of summer. Thus the highest temperatures are in August.
If you're farther north(Alaska for me) the seasons are even more skewed. We have the month of May to the first week of June is Spring(Mud season) The rest of June to half way through August is Summer. The rest of August to the beginning/middle of October is Fall and everything else is winter, with February being the coldest month. Although, expect our first really cold days to be around thanksgiving.
Here in Australia our seasons are a little different, where Winter only runs from around July 12th to July 26th, and every other day is Summer Except from December to April it's like a Super Summer where the UV index exceeds 11 every damn day and humidity just forgets to go home, leaving you at risk of heat stroke if you stay outside too long without preparing first
I schedule my year around this. My gym semester usually starts and ends every quarter from the end of August to the end of November and from the end of February to the end of May. Not too dark and not too hot.
I'm from the southern hemisphere, and the title and thumbnail makes way more sense from our perspective, because Mid to Late december is usually extremely hot since it's the middle of summer. The coldest days here are around June-July
Several people in the comments section are mentioning my beloved meteorological seasons system that we use in Australia, and while I haven't looked all the way through the comments, I haven't seen anyone mention a technicality about that system I find interesting and want to mention it here. So meteorological seasons work by looking at the year, finding the block of 3 calendar months that is hottest on average, which will be set as summer, and then the block of 3 calendar months that is the coldest on average, and setting that as winter, and then the months between these are set as autumn and spring on the appropriate sides. This could technically mean that we end up having a 2 month spring and a 4 month autumn, but in practice never does.
I do not agree with “they are not opposite if you look at daytimes” argument. You fliped the day night time graph horizontal but you should be flipping it vertically because daytime indicator is in the vertical axis and the horizontal axis is just the day count. If you do that you would see the first day of summer is exactly opposite of first day of winter (you can put vertically reversed graph of summer onto the normal winter graph and it will fit like a puzzle piece)
Who actually bases seasons on solstices/equinoxes? I've never heard such a thing. Each season is just a quarter of the year - three months. Our calendar is based on astronomy, but only in the sense that it is fixed to one year per solar year.
I like these videos in general and especially this one, but at only 4 minutes run time, having about a quarter of that (~55 out of 237 seconds) advertisement feels wrong.
01:00 "These features are how we technically divvy up the seasons." Only if you think that summer _begins_ on _mid_summer's day (i.e. the summer solstice).
Same in Norway, although up here in the north we still tend to get a fair amount of snow in March. We also often get snow in November and occasionally in October, just like we might get snow in April, so it’s just that our winters are longer.
New Zealand does it on months, not equinoxes. So I hadn't realised that there were places that paid attention to when the equinoxes and solstices were as anything more than novelty.
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Are you humans?
Love you 🥰
U guys r good at drawing and entertaining also I love u vids so much
I think you forgot something. For it to represent it in reverse, dont you have to turn it upside down?
I'm surprised they didn't mention that this is the same reason why Afternoon is MUCH hotter than at Noon, when the Sun is most directly overhead!
Huh, don't know why I didn't figure it out until now. I kept thinking that since sunrise and sunset is basically the same thing in reverse, the temperature during those times should be pretty much the same.
But the water analogy really makes sense. Water takes time to boil and freeze, and the Earth takes time to heat and cool.
I was going to say, no noon is much hotter. But then I realized I live near the equator.
Thank you for making me realizing this!
@@diakounknown1225 yes this
@@diakounknown1225 oh ma god same
I know of three ways to define the seasons. For example spring: Astronomical: Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice. Meteorological, March, April, May. Phenological: It's spring when nature wakes up and it looks like spring.
Yup. And by the last definition "spring" travels through Europe from Portugal to Norway. It's a weird definition with a funny inference: the start of spring is kind of a wave then xD
Mother Spring marching north. That’s adorable.
Yeah, then one day you wake up and find those trees that were covered in nice flowers are now covered in snow or frost. At least where I live, the temperatures down just start to rise. They rise, then fall, you wait for months to get a bit of warmth and then you get a heat wave that just burns everything and stepping outside is like going into an oven.
Seasons used to be divided up as half way between the equinox and solstice. Halloween being the start of winter. Winter ending in early Feb. May day being the start of Summer. And summer ending with the agricultural festival Lammas in early August.
Solar system has the equinox /solstice in the middle of the season. Which makes sense when you hear the summer solstice called midsummer's day
It should be noted that some cultures, such as China, consider the solstices and equinoxes to be the midpoints of the seasons, not the starts. So the Chinese season called 冬, usually translated as Winter, runs from about November 7 to about February 4.
Interesting, thanks.
i.e. the correct way
Wow that is a much better "slice" of what I'd consider winter
And in Norway we consider the entire month that a solstice or an equinox falls in to belong to the season that Americans think starts at that solstice or equinox, so the typical winter months are December, January and February.
In English, the summer solstice is sometimes called mid summer day, which follows Chinese logic
Over here in India, we have 6 seasons each two months long-
Jan-Feb Winter (Shishir)
Mar-Apr Spring (Vasant)
May-Jun Summer (Grishma)
Jul-Aug Monsoon (Varsha)
Sep-Oct Autumn (Sharad)
Nov-Dec Pre Winter (Hemant)
In Kerala (which is very close to the equator), only two seasons are usually recognized - summer season and rainy season. There's a bit of overlap between the two.
@@ranjith27 yup vedic Sanksrit, I reckon,
also this is more true for the north India
South usually has less seasons
@@samarnadra interesting...
@@ranjith27 yup sanskrit
@@Shenron557 the same also happens in Sri Lanka.
I have a personal anecdote. Lake Michigan is utterly freezing all summer and only gets warm enough to swim in late August, right before the air temperature begins to drop.
:(
Similarly, the seasons in Washington are Cold Rain, Warm Rain and Mid-July/August.
You ain't kidding. I went on a tourist outing rowing on Lake Superior in July and it was the coldest I've ever been in the summer.
..
-
We do use temperature for seasons. At least here in Sweden, the official definition for seasons is based on the average temperature over a 24 hour period.
these national classifications are decided by your country's bureau of meterology (or the swedish equivalent). As such, they define the metereological seasons - based on weather (and thus, temperature) whereas kate is talking about astronomical seasons - defined by the movement of the earth (based on astronomy!), and thus, daylight hours.
hope this clears things up!
@@stolenshortsword Agreed. However it seemed to me that the vide implied that most people make use of astronomical seasons. I think almost no one uses those.
As far as I remember it's actually average temperature of 7 24 hour periods in a row that starts a new season. With winter defined as below 0 C and summer above 10 C.
So 7 days of -2 C makes it winter but another 4 days of 11 C still means it is winter despite summer being defined as temperatures above 10 C.
But it is mostly Summer and Winter that is defined this way, spring and autumn just exists in the gap between them.
It's kinda funny actually, I live in the north and our winter started at least a month ago maybe 2, and only couple weeks ago the radio ads started for winter tires. At that point we had had at least 2 feet of snowfall. But I guess the south finally nears winter.
@@VorpalGun I agree! I don't know anyone who uses astronomical seasons. Not the ones she spoke about at least. If I were to define seasons by calendar I would have said winter started in December, even though based on daylight it would be closer to say it starts in January.
She was talking about the majority of countries/people
How you define "opposite" matters. If you consider the the night and day portions, you can use the graph to see an "opposite" symmetry between winter and summer. Take that graph section representing winter, rotate it 180-degrees and slide it over to the summer segment. Night in the winter lines up with day in the summer.
Fall feeling sooo much different from spring, despite having similar temperature, because the day ia so much shorter, is such a great explanation.
I mean I kinda knew it all of those things but I didn't really connect that the daylight difference is _the thing_ that breaks the symmetry between autumn and spring.
Aside from, the changes in vegetation and the knowledge of what lies ahead.
The way I think about it, in spring the air is warming up but the ground is still frozen, in autumn the air has a cold bite but the ground is still warm.
What breaks the symmetry is the same what causes the delay between the graphs of sunlight hours and temperature. This delay is caused by the heat capacity of the earth, mostly that from its plenty water: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity
I always thought it was weird that the shortest and longest days were the beginning of winter/summer. I always felt like they should be in the middle, precisely because of as the video mentioned it feels like summer and winter are the two opposite endpoints.
Man, the earth really loves complexity
And imagine learning it.
hey do you like object shows?
@@sabithasafar maybe
Complexity is the norm. Simplicity is the exception.
If things weren't so complex they wouldn't be.
I haven't given this much thought before I started growing vegetables on my balcony. Which made me realize that growing season for many plants starts in spring when it's still pretty cold, because it's the daylight and not the temperature that's the deciding factor. As long as there are no longer frosts during nights.
In Australia, the first of December is the first day of summer, the first day of March is the first day of autumn, the first day of June is the first day of winter, and the first day of Sepetember is the first day of spring. This makes more sense, as the equinox/solcist is in the middle of the season
This is pretty much how my household counts seasons, except that we live in America so the months are reversed: winter begins with December, spring begins with February - we live in California so we count there as being less winter and more spring - summer begins with June and fall begins with September.
This leaves us with 2 months of winter (December and January),
4 months of spring (February, March, April, and May),
3 months of summer (June, July, and August)
and 3 months of fall (September, October, and November),
which ends up feeling pretty true to nature, at least where we live.
Spring - March, April and May
Summer - June, July and August
Autumn - September, October and November
Winter - December, January and February
I was already taught this in kindergarten and it matches the seasons in Europe pretty well. I've always been confused why many people shift the seasons 20 days or so forward.
Where I live we were taught the same but the solstice and equinox definitions line up pretty well
So spring is actually mostly April may and June
Summer is July august and September
Autumn is October November December and winter is January February march
these are the seasons we use in Australia but in reverse obviously cause we're in the southern hemisphere
The March is the first month of spring. The first day of astronomical spring is at 21st of March.
Both of those ideas float in some cultures simonteniously (this word is not possible to spell) without any contradictions between them. It’s a bit weird. In March it’s already sometimes warm and somewhat bright.
I prefer the metrological system as well. It's so neat and it doesn't have daffodils growing in winter
Australia uses the same system to align seasons with the months, but in reverse because it’s in the Southern Hemisphere.
Summer - December, January, February.
Autumn - March, April, May
Winter - June, July, August
Spring - September, October, November
Good explanation, but keep in mind it only works when living in medium latitudes. In tropical areas, equinoxes and solstices still happen, but there's often little to no differences in temperatures. And in polar regions summer is very short and the rest of the year is dark and cold.
The video explicitly mentions "If you're in a place where four seasons is a thing."
The video very clearly defined the seasons by the solstices and equinoxes, not by temperature. Summer is always 3 months long with that definition, as are winter, spring and fall.
What the video did badly is telling us that using temperature is intuitive but wrong.
It isn't wrong to use temperature, it is an alternative not used where the writer of the video live.
I live in Sweden and we use meteorological definitions, making temperature the primary thing used to define seasons. We have 4 seasons. Summer is longer in the south than in the north.
It's called seasonal lag, and the same thing happens in a daily basis (that is, the lowest temperatures happening right before sunrise and the highest happening after noon).
And yes, temperature might not be as consistent as daylight, but we can always use the average temperatures of the last 10 or 20 years.
And climatologists actually do. Summer is considered to be the three warmest months (June, July and August) and Winter is the three coldest (December, January and February). This may not be the case for all places on earth, but it is for the vast majority of them.
@@______608 EXACTLY LOL, how come "this is the vast majority of them"? They either completely forgot about the south hemisphere or they were talking about climatologists using the 3 hotter and 3 colder months...
Literally half of the planet is a minority now huh?
@@gabrielxavier2676 Yep, I forgot about the southern hemisphere, and the worst thing of all is that I happen to live in the southern hemisphere.
I made that comment 5 months ago so maybe I decided to describe the northern hemisphere for simplicity.
As someone whose birthday is this shortest day, this is a fact of life that I’m always thankful for- that I don’t gotta celebrate my birthday in literal ice
The four seasons in my town (México, mountain In the gulf side) are.
Cold wind season. Hot wind season. Hot hurricane season. Cold wet season.
Bruh
In my one it's rain, more rain, cold rainy season and a bit less rain.
Well, China and the Celts, along with other cultures do follow the temperature level, which is why we have our Mid-Autumn Festival (Mooncake fest) around September Equinox.
While the Romans and Greeks and then the Western world adopted the sunlight based pattern.
Perhaps the massive landmass of places like China or Central Europe made temperature increase and decrease quickly, unlike the City of Rome which is surrounded by water, and water is better in retaining heat which is why it takes longer for the seasons in Italy to change from hot to cold.
Mind blown. I was just thinking about how fall is overall actually warmer then spring and a a couple of months about how the hot part of the summer is actually the at the end of the long days with less day time.
I always keep waiting for it to get warmer in spring and it takes forever, and feels like winter takes forever to start after fall.. now I have it neatly organized in my head!
And I can only imagine how all of this sounds so theoretical to people living in tropical and subtropical regions 😅
Straight up.
Where I grew up in South Florida, November was when the heat finally broke, but it didn't get _"cold"_ (~40°F) until January and March was the inverse of November.
"Assuming you live in a place where the four seasons are a thing"
The South: *We don't do that here*
People living near the equator: laughs in all summer
@@AndyHappyGuy
Forest Fires and Droughts: **Laughs along with the people**
I started seeing you in many video's comment sections. You'll become like the Some guy without a mustage in the future, probably.
@@AndyHappyGuy we do have seasons in the north of Brasil, which lies in the equator. A dry and a wet season.
@@capivara6094 same, but for temeprature it just feels like all summer.
What I’ve never understood is this: In central Texas, our average coldest day is about three weeks after the winter solstice, but our average hottest day is about seven weeks after the summer solstice. I’m sure there’s some good meteorological reason for it, but it’s always baffled me why the average coldest and hottest days aren’t the same length of time after the solstices.
My guess is that our "winters" are so much shorter than our summers, so the length of time it takes to start to warm up again after the solstice is shorter, which moves the average coldest day closer to the solstice. That’s a completely uneducated guess, however. If I ever run into a meteorologist somewhere, that’s the first question I’ll ask.
I don't know the reason for specific areas, but changes in wind direction and/or solar radiation likely play a part. It seems in the south-west of the US late-spring and early-summer are sunnier than mid-summer, so temperature peaks earlier. In the south-east late-summer is sunnier, so temperature peaks later. I don't know exactly about winter. Especially in the western half of the US the lowest temperatures occur at or slightly after the shortest day, but in the eastern half it's closer to mid-winter, as in Europe for example. It likely has to do with changes in wind direction, but I don't know the exact mechanism.
I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure it's typical for it to take longer to warm up than to cool down (seasonwise). Maybe it's because coldness is simply lack of warmth idk.
This is also the reason why it feels hotter during the evening (4~5pm-ish) than at noon. There's more heat raining down from above at noon but it's only a few hours after that the earth begins to radiate back the heat it stored out of the ground; adding more heat overall
In post-soviet countries our seasons start on the first days of months. Like, winter starts 1st of December, spring on the 1st of March etc.
So for us the hottest day IS actually around the middle of the summer :)
Same in Australia. But in reverse of course, summer starts 1st December.
It's like that in most countries. It's just the Americans that are special, placing midsummer on the first day of summer.
The date in the video thumbnail is only wrong for half of the world.
no it’s for all the world?
@@Qwaziopwinter starts on the 21st of December in the north, not every place on earth is the south
@@MidnightGD5 bruh I’m in ohio and I think that’s north
There’s another issue too, namely that the solstices are in fact the hottest and coldest days of the year in the Mediterranean
We have four seasons but different
Hot and dry
Hot and wet
Cold and wet
Cold and dry
Mainly just how strong typhoons struck
Who's we?
Where are you from?
@@diegonals probably from the tropics. in mexico jts also just wet season and dry season with slight temperature variations
@@--julian_ im also from México and I do use the 4 seasons, but probably because they are different here
The temperature graph is like the integral of the daylight graph since the temperature on earth does not change instantly and has a summing effect
I've grown up with metrological definition of seasons, where the boundaries between seasons are defined by the actual temperatures that happened this year. That means that we sometimes skip a season, since the conditions were never fulfilled.
Now I understand why January and February always felt brighter than December.
There is more sunlight, but also snow is shiny and amplifies what light there is.
I noticed for a while that there was a discrepancy between temperature and seasons. Thankyou for explaining why. I really enjoy the short information.
March is still considered winter here. From late March till mid April, the raining season starts. Then from mid April till early June is spring. I live in Almaty anyway & in the capital Astana, sometimes April is still snowing
It’s all a thing of perspectives really, you could also argue that summer/winter and spring/autumn are mirror images with the day/night durations switched the same way you can argue that spring/summer and autumn/winter are mirrored but with the same day/night distribution
Well if you can find non mirror differences between them then they are not symmetrical to each other.
@@piotrrywczak That’s not true exactly. It’s kinda like how point symmetry and axial symmetry are both forms of symmetry but also symmetrical in a way the other one isn’t (with some overlapping conditions)
If fall is symmetrical to something then there exists a season which mirrors fall. There is no such season. Winter doesn’t mirror temperature. Spring doesn’t mirror day time.
Actually I'd argue the daylight graph explains a lot of how we experience spring and fall. As soon as I saw it, my response was that this was a great illustration and made a lot of sense.
It's more complicated than that. The thermal capacity of the soil isn't that big, it would cause the temperature lag of maybe one week, not 6 weeks as it is in reality. The biggest reason for the delay is the atmospheric processes and movements. The simplest way to explain it, in the Northen Hemisphere we shoud've had the temperature starting to increase in February, but because the Arctic starts to get some daylight, the air there starts to move and we all here have a lot of cold northern Arctic winds instead.
I think you made a mistake at 1:00.
You mirror the image in the X-axis (horizontally), and say that summer is spring in reverse. This is true, when only looking at daylight times.
However, if you flipped the image of spring in the Y-axis (vertically), you'd get that spring equals fall. It's just that what used to be night is now day, and vice versa.
So spring and summer are each others' **reverse,** but spring and fall still are each others' **opposites** :)
In many post-USSR countries seasons start on the 1-st day of December, March, June, and September for Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn respectively
I have this theory that the reason that people get grumpy around this time of year is because the rate of change of day length (which is the derivative of length of day (i.e. cos(x) -> sin (x) is highest in mid autumn. I don't have any evidence for this but nor have I ever seen any research sugesting it isn't true and there's certainly anecdotal evidence people find mid autumn a particularly stresful time.
It's like turning off an induction stove, the heat source is turned off, or lowered, but heat is still transferring to the pot from the element to the pot because the element is still hotter than the pot, which increases the temperature of the pot for a few moments after being turned off.
Now to watch the video.
... do you mean a conduction stove? In an induction stove their is no heating element; the pot is heated directly.
@@BetaKeja I probably do mean that. lol thanks for the correction.
i am inLIGHTened and your illustrations are COOL
Over here, we talk about metrological seasons, which are pretty much based on temperature. And that do lag compared to regular seasons. In fact, lately it has lagged a lot. But is a thing here.
Ireland is pretty much stuck in mid-Autumn rains. I wish for concepts like Sun and Snow.
In reality, I just change the temperatures and weather whenever I feel like it
As someone who lives in a country witho no seasons, I was surprised when I learned that solstices an equinoxes are the start of the seasons and not their midpoints
If you use the solar system they are in the midpoint. Astrological they are at the start and metrological fits neatly into months with December January and February being in spring ext.
If you don't have seasons I'm assuming you live quite close to the equator. What do you think about the daylight differences between summer and spring that we get on the UK or further north?
I knew this information years ago when I was shocked when I knew that: The Sun is closer to the Earth during winter for the Northern Hemisphere :) and I wondered what determines the temperature?
I believe that you do know the answer?
It does almost nothing
Yeah, but that's a rather small effect compared to the earth's axis tilt (which is the reason for our seasons)
"Why don't we just use temperature to divide up the four seasons?" Speak for yourself. I use temperature. I do not acknowledge the legitimacy of any seasonal division that puts the beginning of each season any later than the 7th of the month that contains the solstice / equinox. And I'm hardly the only one; the traditional English names for the summer and winter solstices are Midsummer and Midwinter.
(And OKAY maybe part of the reason I will die on this hill is that my birthday is in mid-September and I flat REFUSE to have a summer birthday because I DESPISE summer BUT WHATEVER)
The video quite clumsily used master suppression techniques. It said that one thing is correct and another is wrong, even if a lot of nations actually use the thing that is "wrong".
The video should have stated that astronomical definition is a common thing, not the only thing. It should then also have stated that the temperature is an alternative, but is not part of the astronomical definition. As is, it says using temperature is just wrong.
Whole world: we have 4 seasons!
Indian subcontinent: Well we have 0 to 6 seasons depending upon location!
so true its kinda weird that there no monsoon in the rest of the world
Brilliant! Such a great and simple explanation. Thanks!
This is illuminating
The background music for this video should be Four Seasons by Vivaldi
Thank you i was WONDERING about this. Im a biologist and astronomer. I always pay attention to the Equinox' and Solstice'
Loving the narration - clear, engaging and a wonderful accent!
This is also the reason why the hottest time of day is usually around 3pm instead of noon, and the coldest part of the day is around 3am instead of midnight!
A perfect presentation. Explain simply and support with clear graph/animation. And keep it short. Straight to the point.
On this subject, I've always wondered why an increased amount of light in the past makes the present hotter but a decreased amount of light in the future doesn't make the present colder. But the objects are affected by the temperature of close objects equally in all directions of the 3 spatial axis
There is only the present. Past and Future are only concepts in our minds. But with the difference that past times already have happened, e.g. were at some point the present and "real", e.g. did already have an effect. The future is only a prediction what could happen. The past actually did happen.
But it kinda does?
If you have a lower temperature in the future then the present temperature will go down. With time.
However there is no causality in that. Obviously. Because the temperature is going down now for whatever reason, the temperature in the future will be lower.
At some point when thinking about physical systems you need to take into consideration the arrow of time ;P
Like. Black Body Radiation doesn’t generate photons from an arbitrarily far away point in space to then fly towards the black body and be absorbed by it. The photons originating at the surface of the body are emitted into space and carry the energy away. Funnily enough, if the universe was uniformly hot and dense it kinda wouldn’t matter.
Like a Brazilian on Southern Hemisphere, you truly represented us
She literally started the video with “if you live in the northern hemisphere” which most viewers do.
It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to flip the hot and cold seasons
@@DanS044 Ok, we already knew this
@@DanS044 lol no she didn't, instead she used terms like '4 season folk' which can also refer to people in the southern hemisphere. She only specified the north pole for the graph that represented seasons relative to specific calendar days.
The Swedish Meteoroligical and Hydrological Institute defines the start of seasons as when the daily mean temeperature consistently is above/below certain temperatures. Spring when daily mean temperature is above freezing for 7 consecutive days, summer when daily mean temperature is above 10C/50F for 5 consecutive days, fall when daily mean temperature is below 10C/50F for 5 consecutive days and winter when daily mean temperature is below freezing for 5 consecutive days.
Yee lets go another video right before Christmas month
The warmest days of the year isn’t on midsummer day either. The traditional summer half of the year in Norway starts on the 14th of April, and the winter half starts on the 14th of October. And in the modern calendar we consider December, January and February (with January typically being the coldest) the winter months, March, April and May make up spring, June, July and August are summer (with July tending to be warmest), and September, October and November are autumn.
Ahhh i was having this question some days ago "why is the shortest day not in the middle of winter" amazing i really needed an explanation.
Countries near equator: There is only hot and monsoon season.
I live in São Luís here we have 2 seasons *"HOT"* and *"HOT* with rain".
2:36 that dude is like "f*** yeah, its spring now."
Equator earthlings can't relate. Where we live it's always 12h day/12h night, hot and humid 365 days a year. Well, some months are usually rainier than the others but we're all kinda fed up with the sun to the point that it's baffling to see 4-season earthling would blissfully lie down in the sun around any body of water every time the weather is reasonably sunny.
i like how you guys explain things, it helps me find a way to explain to my nephew at least until he learns enough english to watch these videos himself
How well does that temperature cycle line up with the midpoint of the official seasons around the world? Where does it actually end up like that? Which places reach their peak much closer to the peak daylight? Are there any places which lag behind by even more than 1/8th of a year?
In Norway the coldest days tend to be in mid- to late January and the warmest in mid- to late July.
This phenomenon - called "seasonal lag" - is really interesting! The amount of lag in different places can be very different (due to factors like proximity to water, latitude, etc) and can be different in different seasons (for example, San Francisco has an extremely long lag in summer/fall, but almost no lag in winter/spring).
@@Anvilshock How could they say no to that when you asked so nicely... cough
Canada actually has 11 seasons:
Winter
Joke Spring
Second Winter
Fool's Spring
Third Winter
Mud Season
Actual Spring
Summer
False Fall
Second Summer (1 week)
Actual Fall
Seasons used to be divided up as half way between the equinox and solstice. Halloween being the start of winter. Winter ending in early Feb. May day being the start of Summer. And summer ending with the agricultural festival Lammas in early August.
Australia and New Zealand divide seasons on months. With 1 Dec being the start of summer and 1 June being the start of winter.
Then you have places like Auckland where you can have 4 seasons in 1 day 🤣😭😭😭
It's actually more of a gyroscopic precession type of thing. Once days get to a certain length, the overall energy input for a day is greater than the output, thus increasing the temperature. That starts in spring and ends near the end of summer. Thus the highest temperatures are in August.
If you're farther north(Alaska for me) the seasons are even more skewed. We have the month of May to the first week of June is Spring(Mud season) The rest of June to half way through August is Summer. The rest of August to the beginning/middle of October is Fall and everything else is winter, with February being the coldest month. Although, expect our first really cold days to be around thanksgiving.
I've always wondered about this. Thanks for explaining!
Here in Australia our seasons are a little different, where Winter only runs from around July 12th to July 26th, and every other day is Summer
Except from December to April it's like a Super Summer where the UV index exceeds 11 every damn day and humidity just forgets to go home, leaving you at risk of heat stroke if you stay outside too long without preparing first
I schedule my year around this. My gym semester usually starts and ends every quarter from the end of August to the end of November and from the end of February to the end of May. Not too dark and not too hot.
I'm from the southern hemisphere, and the title and thumbnail makes way more sense from our perspective, because Mid to Late december is usually extremely hot since it's the middle of summer. The coldest days here are around June-July
Several people in the comments section are mentioning my beloved meteorological seasons system that we use in Australia, and while I haven't looked all the way through the comments, I haven't seen anyone mention a technicality about that system I find interesting and want to mention it here.
So meteorological seasons work by looking at the year, finding the block of 3 calendar months that is hottest on average, which will be set as summer, and then the block of 3 calendar months that is the coldest on average, and setting that as winter, and then the months between these are set as autumn and spring on the appropriate sides. This could technically mean that we end up having a 2 month spring and a 4 month autumn, but in practice never does.
Only 100 views in 41 minutes they deserve more
1:00 actually when you flip spring vertically you get fall except night and day swap places
and when you flip summer you do get inverse winter
I do not agree with “they are not opposite if you look at daytimes” argument. You fliped the day night time graph horizontal but you should be flipping it vertically because daytime indicator is in the vertical axis and the horizontal axis is just the day count. If you do that you would see the first day of summer is exactly opposite of first day of winter (you can put vertically reversed graph of summer onto the normal winter graph and it will fit like a puzzle piece)
if you divide the year into eighths
the mid-points between the equinoxes and solstices
are about FEB5 , MAY5 , AUG5 , OCT5
Seasons in India,
Hot Summer (March - June)
Wet Summer (July - September)
Warm Summer (October - November)
Cool Summer (December - February)
💪🏼
In Lunar-celendar-using countries, Equinoxes and Solstices are the midpoints of seasons, the starts is Lichun, Lixia, Liqiu and Lidong.
Who actually bases seasons on solstices/equinoxes? I've never heard such a thing. Each season is just a quarter of the year - three months. Our calendar is based on astronomy, but only in the sense that it is fixed to one year per solar year.
This episode surprised me in a good way.
I like these videos in general and especially this one, but at only 4 minutes run time, having about a quarter of that (~55 out of 237 seconds) advertisement feels wrong.
The episode is OSM like all other your video.
This was something I didn't know, that I needed to know! Thanks!!!
I live in Indonesia. Only rainy or dry are count as a "seoson". And both not even have a clear schedule and different in each province.
2:32 how is the shadow becast fromthe sun clock when it is facing the sun?
Good Videos, MinuteEarth!!!
01:00 "These features are how we technically divvy up the seasons." Only if you think that summer _begins_ on _mid_summer's day (i.e. the summer solstice).
Thanks for the great video!
Fantastic video!
We experience 6 seasons ...
This is the reason we never have white christmas where I live, even though it snows every winter.
And december is the only month I WANT snow! :(
Yeah, unfortunately January, February and even March are the months where it snows where I live
In Russia spring starts on the first of March and that makes more sense.
Same in Norway, although up here in the north we still tend to get a fair amount of snow in March. We also often get snow in November and occasionally in October, just like we might get snow in April, so it’s just that our winters are longer.
New Zealand does it on months, not equinoxes. So I hadn't realised that there were places that paid attention to when the equinoxes and solstices were as anything more than novelty.
Amazing!
Closer to the equator in Africa we just have the dry season and rainy season, the length of the day is the same all year round
Why isn't MinuteEarth on Nebula???
After looking at the graph, Can we say that temperature lags daylight roughly by 45⁰ phase?