A question that I get quite a few times is about winter temperatures. The question goes: Why isn’t the shortest day of the year (least amount of sunlight which happens on December 21 this year) also the coldest? Good question! If the length of the day was the only thing that controlled our temperature, then we would start to warm up in January. But as we all know, that’s not the case. As we go through the fall months, we are losing daylight every day but the sun is at a high enough angle and also out longer so that it’s still warming up the earth. That’s why it takes a while for us to cool down in the fall. As the earth loses more heat than it’s getting late in the fall and early in the winter, it takes more to warm us up. So, as the day gets longer in January and February, we may have more sun but the earth remains cold. But as we get closer to spring, the sun gets higher in the sky and is staying out longer each day and we begin the slow warm up towards summer. Of course, there are other factors that will give us a very mild day in the middle of January and a cool day in July, but that’s a question for another day!
Weather Last Week
December 9: 16/39/0”
December 10: 12/39/Trace
December 11: 24/47/0”
December 12: 19/51/0”
December 13: 15/30/0”
December 14: 11/53/0”
December 15: 23/56/0”
Forecast discussion for the week ahead:
The first day of winter is this weekend and Christmas is right around the corner, however, it’s not going to feel much like late December in the coming days. Temperatures are expected to be at or above the normal high (near 40) for the next several days. With high pressure in place, precipitation will be hard to come by for a while, too.