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The Cold

  • Thread starter Thread starter TheKanga
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Pistol Night said:
Like Stephen Hawking having sex
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Shocked Eddie Murphy GIF
 
RedmanWasHere said:
Is it time to piss away the concept of seasons?
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The earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees on its axis. As it goes round the sun in 365 days the hemisphere that is tilted towards the sun gets more sun and gets hotter, hence summer. The hemisphere that gets less sun gets colder and has winter. That's not going to change for millions of years. But within the nature of the seasons there's a huge amount of variability for what the weather does each year.

One weird thing is that plants and animals seem to know the seasons regardless of the weather. My apple trees looked dead then sprung to life when it was still pretty chilly. Birds seem to migrate at the time of year not the weather. Many aquatic creatures have seasonal cycles of migration and reproduction. I don't think the oceans change so much between seasons - so I wonder if they sense something else.
 
RedmanWasHere said:
Is it time to piss away the concept of seasons?
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As they do in some other countries, we should change the dates to align them with the solstices, so the seasons would make more sense, because they'd start 21 or 22 days later. For example, our Summer would start on the 21st or 22nd of December, obviously instead of the 1st
 
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Cyber_punk said:
I close the door to my bedroom and my PC works beautifully as a heater, adds a good 5c at least it feels like. Don't even need to turn the ducted on
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sorted said:
If you got six more PCs you could heat the whole house!
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Or have them mine for the last vestiges of crypto.
 
Registered User said:
As they do in some other countries, we should change the dates to align them with the solstices, so the seasons they'd make more sense, because they'd start 21 or 22 days later. For example, our Summer would start on the 21st or 22nd of December, obviously instead of the 1st
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Is that based on Summer being the hottest days of the year? There's definitely a lag from the relative sun and earth positions as the oceans heat up etc. But I'm not sure, on average, the hottest days are all after the solstice.
 
sorted said:
Is that based on Summer being the hottest days of the year? There's definitely a lag from the relative sun and earth positions as the oceans heat up etc. But I'm not sure, on average, the hottest days are all after the solstice.
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Now that I've looked into only a little more, I've noticed that, considering temperatures, our current season dates line up fine with the cooler months, but solstice-aligned season dates would line up better in Summer.
As it stands, our official Summer ends only a couple of weeks after what are usually our hottest days, but our coldest days, in mid-July, are bang in the middle of our Winter. In other words, my suggestion was only half right :grinv1:


melbourne temperature graph.JPG
 
Registered User said:
Now that I've looked into only a little more, I've noticed that, considering temperatures, our current season dates line up fine with the cooler months, but solstice-aligned season dates would line up better in Summer.
As it stands, our official Summer ends only a couple of weeks after what are usually our hottest days, but our coldest days, in mid-July, are bang in the middle of our Winter. In other words, my suggestion was only half right :grinv1:


View attachment 1555884
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If I understand that graph correctly, they have taken the mean maximum temperature for each month and plotted that value in the middle of each month on the chart, and drawn straight lines between the values. So it doesn't answer our question of when Summer should start based on which days of the year are the hottest.

Based on BOM data for Melbourne Airport from 1971 onwards this is what I worked out for the daily average maximum temperatures. Apart from a bit of a dip around Christmas Day (thanks Santa), the maximum temperatures climb after the solstice and remain higher than the early December temperatures until late February. It might confirm your idea that Summer should start at the solstice.

But then we would have to look at whether it would push the end of Summer into late March and more cooler temperatures. That's another bedtime story...

1668776273730.png
 

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sorted said:
The earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees on its axis. As it goes round the sun in 365 days the hemisphere that is tilted towards the sun gets more sun and gets hotter, hence summer. The hemisphere that gets less sun gets colder and has winter. That's not going to change for millions of years. But within the nature of the seasons there's a huge amount of variability for what the weather does each year.

One weird thing is that plants and animals seem to know the seasons regardless of the weather. My apple trees looked dead then sprung to life when it was still pretty chilly. Birds seem to migrate at the time of year not the weather. Many aquatic creatures have seasonal cycles of migration and reproduction. I don't think the oceans change so much between seasons - so I wonder if they sense something else.
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in America at least the first day of spring and autum are moving, based on leaves turning/plants flowering/animals migrating

they don''t start up on a certain day so much as when conditions start trending in the direction they want

its why cold snaps etc are so damaging to crops
 
I'm wondering what is the point of having official dates for the seasons. We don't change the clocks on that basis. Sporting events are not organised around them. School holidays don't start on December 1. I'm pretty sure farmers would be considering historic patterns and the long term weather forecasts rather than a date on the calendar.

I'm thinking humans like to divide their existence by time periods. Some of which are based on real physical things like years, months and days. But concepts like centuries, decades, hours, minutes and seconds are more arbitrary. Seasons are somewhere in between. They are based on real annual climate patterns but it's not like there are set dates on when they start and end.
 
sorted said:
I'm wondering what is the point of having official dates for the seasons. We don't change the clocks on that basis. Sporting events are not organised around them. School holidays don't start on December 1. I'm pretty sure farmers would be considering historic patterns and the long term weather forecasts rather than a date on the calendar.

I'm thinking humans like to divide their existence by time periods. Some of which are based on real physical things like years, months and days. But concepts like centuries, decades, hours, minutes and seconds are more arbitrary. Seasons are somewhere in between. They are based on real annual climate patterns but it's not like there are set dates on when they start and end.
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Months are largely arbitrary. There would be 13 not fitting exactly into a year, if the moon's orbit was actually used. (Even the day and year are adjusted for convenience, hence the leap year to realign years into full days.)

The seasons could be based on definitive phenomena, but are not. Meteorological seasons are convenient labels, not always applied the same in different countries (and not just because January is cold in the northern hemisphere).
"Astronomical seasons" do follow physical phenomena. Southern hemisphere astronomical summer begins around 22 December, possibly 21 December with time zone difference to South America, with the summer solstice.
 
Seasons are determined by solstices and equinoxes over here. Seems a better way to do it.

And, yeah, just on the cold, we had a big dump of snow yesterday. Got my winter tyres on just in time. Kids off school today and sledding/shoveling the drive.
 

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the_interloper said:
Mate you can't really participate in this thread given where you are located (you bastard)
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cold is all relative
this 17 feels like 13 would be like 12 feels like 8 for you!

im cold dammit
socks and crocs on
 
Perisher Valley just registered Australia’s equal lowest summer temperature on record after plunging to -7ºC early this morning.

An unseasonably cold air mass combined with clear skies and light winds allowed temperatures to dive across southeastern Australia on Thursday night.

Sub-zero temperatures were recorded in parts of NSW, Vic and the ACT early on Friday morning, with the mercury also dipping as low as 1.5ºC in SA and 8.2ºC in Qld. These temperatures were about 5 to 10ºC below average for early summer.

The coldest place in the country on Friday morning was the mainland Alps, where several weather stations cooled below -4ºC.

Perisher Valley’s low of -7.0ºC just after 5:30am on Friday was the equal lowest summer temperature on record in Australia. The same temperature was observed at Perisher in January 1979 and at Charlotte Pass in December 1999.

www.weatherzone.com.au

Australia's lowest summer temp on record

Perisher Valley just registered Australia’s equal lowest summer temperature on record after plunging to -7ºC early this morning. An unseasonably cold air mass combined with clear skies and light winds allowed temperatures to dive across souteastern Australia on Thursday night. Sub-zero...
www.weatherzone.com.au www.weatherzone.com.au
 

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