Small Seasons
smallseasons.guide
smallseasons.guide
Being raised in Brazil, on a urban environment there are basically two seasons: Summer and Winter, the rest is just transition between them.
Now, having just moved to the USA I am constantly incredibly confused by season references. Not only because the seasons are inverted, but because we do not use season references for anything in Brazil. We say the months name or things like "end/middle/start of the year" or "first/second semester"
So when I see that a movie will come to the theaters "next fall" I have no idea when it is.
More seriously, the CSIRO has attempted to define Australia's seasons better (in line with plants) with the addition of Sprinter on Sprummer: http://www.publish.csiro.au/book/7221 . The BOM has a page on various indigenous seasons too: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/index.shtml . I'm enjoying an unseasonably warm Chunnup day today.
Next rant: which Timezone are we talking about.
Agreed. This has been bugging me for a while.
Over here in Poland, between the yearly variations in temperatures and the differences between urban and rural areas, I don't see how the concept of "Spring" and "Fall" make any kind of sense. Not when in a small city where I live "Spring" starts up to month later than in a large city 70km to the north.
Why not switch to two seasons, Summer and Winter, and use equinoxes as split points? The seasons would at least have a nice definition then: summer = days are longer than nights; winter = nights are longer than days.
EDIT: Speaking of the article, I can't imagine how this super fine-grained classification could work. The usual four seasons have already so much variation in when they start vs. when phenomena associated with them actually happen; I can't imagine e.g. "Geese fly north, the first rainbows of the year appear. - Apr 4" working as anything but "April 4 ± 1 month", which kind of defeats the purpose of this classification.
It's not to determine the date from the season or the season from the date.
It's to be able to say "Sparrows were late this year - the last three times that happened there was an insect problem, let's keep an eye out for that."
Edit: I couldn't find a good definitive source of etymology/roots etc, so here's a rough sheet of what was able to scrape from the web as well as my own knowledge/interpretation: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT8PGYX8c46N...
I wonder what other parts of the world have "weird" seasons?
Winter breaks into the damp start, the still but gloomy mid winter, and the sharp coldness[1] of late winter. All the others break down similarly.
[1] UK doesn't really have winters like I remember from youth and twenties any more.
Chinese 节气 are certainly not defined or tracked by natural phenomena such as fish becoming visible under the ice or plants blooming, though. As Wikipedia notes, they are defined astronomically and are used to calculate when an extra month needs to be inserted into the calendar.
(Each 节气 is assigned a polarity, yin or yang. A month is supposed to include one yin point and one yang point. Since lunar months are too short, eventually there will be a month with only one point instead of the correct two; that month is immediately repeated. I think this system is very cool because just a little thought will show that it is guaranteed to stay within one month of the "true" position of the earth wrt the sun, using just the dead simple method of "Oh, were we too slow this month? We'll put in some overtime.")
> Solar terms originated in China, then spread to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, countries in the East Asian cultural sphere.
https://github.com/echelon/microseasons
It's just a toy project I used to learn Swift. The code isn't particularly great.
By the same token, I am curious how else we can come to understand seasons and yearly cycles. The climate stability that led to this sequence of small seasons and their associations with agriculture has begun to vanish. With the worsening climate emergency, where there is no "new normal," what yearly cycles can we still hold onto?
You can be the one who stayed in the village or the one who left the village for the big city, but you can't be both. You can be one who left the village but came back, or the one who goes back and forth between the city and the village, but those are different, a third and forth person, and whichever one you pick, you still only get to be one.
Reading it, I wondered how much the 'little seasons' are identical between various regions on the northern hemisphere?
I subscribed to the iCal calendar, and the descriptions have HTML tags in them. Any chance of avoiding this?