Summer officially begins, Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 2:51pm MDT. The Summer Solstice, as some call it, is the time of year when the earth is tilting mostly toward the sun.
The Summer Solstice doesn’t always happen on June 20th, either. It depends on when the sun eventually reaches the northernmost point from the equator and that can happen between June 20 and June 22. After we pass the Summer Solstice, we actually start see less daylight.
The sun starts to go down a little earlier and the sun comes up a little later each day until we get to the first day of winter, when the cycle starts over again. However, even though we are seeing less and less daylight, this is the time of year that the average high starts getting warmer and warmer. This is mainly because land (and water) takes time to warm up so it gets warmer around here a little bit at a time. This is called “Seasonal Lag”.
For Alliance, the average high on June 20th is 82 degrees. On July 12, the average high gets to 89 and stays there all the way through the rest of July and into August. It stays at 89 until August 5th and then starts to slowly decrease again. By the end of summer and the beginning of fall, the average high will have fallen back down to 76 degrees.