Meteorological winter aligns with December-January-February | Hacker News Reader

Meteorological winter aligns with December-January-February

nautil.us

21 pointsdnetesn15 comments

I can't believe that I was an adult when I first learned that seasons are not universal, and I don't mean that July is winter in Australia but summer in Europe. I mean like how in Mali, there are three seasons: the wet (rainy) season from June to mid-December, the dry season from mid-December to March, and a hot season from March to June. The epiphany I experienced was kind of like the one I had during a software engineering class, an exercise in internationalization where students had to write a program that took people's names as an input (which turns out to be quite complicated). It always amazes me how many unexamined assumptions our minds make about how the world works, and it always surprises me when I run into one.

I'm 38 but only noticed a few years ago that calendars say "Winter begins". I feel like as a kid it was "Winter solstice." I always assumed the solstice was the midpoint of winter, not the beginning. Doesn't that make more sense? Anyway, my sense of the seasons is more like children's books: autumn is when the leaves change, winter is when it snows, spring is when the flowers bud, summer is hot. Sounds like meteorological winter still doesn't put the solstice at the middle of winter, but it would be closer.

Yea, I've been thinking about that too. A few weeks ago my 3 year old saw it snowing out and said, "Mom and Dad, it's winter!" A visitor we had over said something to the effect of, "well, actually it's not winter YET, that's not till later in the month." The 3 year old was very confused, as he could clearly see it was winter by the snow outside. I much prefer the 3 year old's simple method for knowing when winter was here.

It always saddens me when I hear of adults closing off conversations with children (and in this case in such a dismissive manner). Adults really should realise that they are constantly teaching children, or rather, children are constantly learning from them. What did this exchange teach?

A better approach is to keep things open - for example, respond with something along the lines of "how do you know?" (or even just "why?"). The you get to talk about seasons and how they relate to temperature and weather, leaves on the trees, snowmen...

So? I remember watching weather reporters as a kid, and even teachers telling us about seasons in primary school, they always had a clear differentiation between "meteorological seasons" and "calendar seasons". Meteorological winter started on December 1st, and ended with the first blooming flowers in early March. November is a bit more confusing, because you traditionally start wearing a winter coat on November 1st, but only in the morning as days are still warm-ish.

I assume different countries will have different meteorological seasons. Just like most countries within a timezone don't exactly sync up with the idea that the sun is at the highest point at noon.

Interesting that the Met Office in the UK says that winter for weather starts on December 31st http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather...

Previous discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10777310

Instead of this somewhat pointless magazine article, the phenomenon of astronomical winter and meteorological winter being out of phase can be used to teach numerous important concepts to children (and, apparently, to magazine contributors). Seasons can teach periodicity, phase relationship, the relationship between an input (solar flux) and a system that integrates that input (atmospheric temperature), leading to the calculus of trigonometric functions, or leading to principles of accounting. Really this one simple natural cycle can be the basis of an entire semester of high school science or math. Whining about the calendar is pretty superficial.

Let's just move the 1st of January to the day the 'real' winter begins. Time... what an invention!

It's ironic this article was written in record-breakingly warm December (in the Eastern United States).

In Minnesota, Winter is November to May.

Best argument possible in favor of not living that far north!

There's not a 100% correlation with low temps and being far north. The Seattle area is as far north as most of Minnesota, and our winters are nothing like theirs (record low here is 0F - Seatac 1950) and it's typically overcast and 45F.

Yes, absolutely! We're mid-continent, and the Laurentian Divide pulls Arctic air downward over our state making it the coldest in the lower 48. Still I'll take our far greater cold sunny days to Seattle's warmer overcast days every single time, thank you.

tl;dr - "i don't like that words have meanings, i'm more interested in feelings"

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