Why is it cold in winter and warm in summer? Why is it cold in winter? Why is it warmer in summer than in winter?

The change of seasons is a common occurrence. Before the onset of winter, people insulate their homes, buy warm shoes and clothes to protect them from the cold, and prepare food so as not to have to go out to the store in the cold. In the summer, everyone goes to the beaches, swims, spends a lot of time under a fan or air conditioner, trying to cool down and get rid of the intense heat. Let's try to understand why it is cold in winter and hot in summer and what are the reasons for changes in air temperature.

All planets of the solar system rotate around the celestial body and its own axis. Their orbit is not round, as many believe, but oval. As it moves around the Sun, the Earth approaches and moves away from it.

The minimum distance between a planet and a celestial body is called perihelion, and the maximum is called aphelion. In the first case, the distance from the Sun is 147,000,000 kilometers, and in the second - 152 million km. When the planet moves away from the celestial body to its maximum distance, winter sets in and it becomes cold.

During the Earth's rotation around the Sun, 50% of the northern hemisphere is tilted towards the celestial body, and the remaining 50% is distant from it. After six months, they change places and where there were low temperatures, warming occurs.

Temperature in summer and winter

Summers are warmer than winters because certain areas of the Earth are closest to the Sun. As the northern hemisphere approaches the celestial body, a large amount of sunlight falls on it. The days become longer, the soil warms up faster and accumulates heat, and the air temperature rises sharply.

The speed of the onset of the hot season is affected by the angle of incidence of the sun's rays. At the distant north pole, they seem to glide along the surface of the planet, and at the close one, they fall to the Earth at a right angle. It is because of this that the soil and water bodies quickly heat up, and then release heat. This combined with the scorching sun creates intense heat.

Meanwhile, the deep layers of the Earth and the oceans do not have time to warm up and remain cold. The conflict between hot and cold layers leads to the greenhouse effect. The space between the earth's crust and thermosphere is heating up even more, causing air temperatures in some regions of the planet to reach incredible levels.

The equator is an imaginary line dividing the Earth into two halves - the northern and southern hemispheres. It crosses three oceans (Atlantic, Pacific and Indian) and 13 countries, including:

Colombia;
Gabon;
Uganda;
Kenya;
Somalia;
Ecuador;
Indonesia.

At the equator there is constant summer and intense heat. This is explained by the fact that in this area the planet receives the largest amount of solar rays while rotating around its axis. Unlike the North Pole, the equator does not move away from the celestial body, so cold weather does not occur there.

Interesting!

Throughout the year, the water temperature at the equator does not change. It is kept at 23-37 degrees above zero.

The minimum temperature at the equator is 25°, and the maximum exceeds 40° Celsius. At night, when the Sun illuminates the other side of the planet, it decreases by about 10 degrees.

Change of seasons in different zones of the Earth

When it is summer in the northern hemisphere, winter begins in the southern hemisphere. This is due to the fact that it becomes distant from the sun and receives less sunlight. Then, when the planet’s axis changes its position, it begins to get warmer at the south pole, and colder at the north pole.

(short correct answer: because the earth's axis is tilted, and therefore much more light falls on one of the hemispheres than on the other, and they smoothly change places after six months)

I was once asked this question during an interview (for a programmer).
Despite the fact that I studied at the physics department of Moscow State University, I did not know the answer.
So he said: “mmm... I don’t know.” Everyone was still surprised, like no one had answered like that before.
It seems they didn’t take me there, or didn’t write to me later, I don’t know, that was a long time ago.

I came home, started googling, researching, and discovered the answer to this seemingly simple, but in fact simply wonderful and brilliant in its simplicity question.

It turned out that they can have fun testing people: watching how a person will behave when you ask him this question, and in public, so that others can hear, but not be able to interfere.

It has long been known that logic does not work for a person: everyone only adjusts and shuffles the facts so that at the end they can concoct those answers, decisions and conclusions that best suit him and will not cause him cognitive dissonance that he is not is right, that he is bad, that he is weak, that he made a mistake, that he was deceived, that he was mistaken, and the like.
And those around them perceive the persuasiveness of a speech almost entirely on emotions, and not on facts: it doesn’t matter what kind of nonsense the speaker will utter, if at the same time he looks adequate and “respectable,” preferably with a bunch of dignities like “Academician of Such-and-such Academy” or “ Honored Minister of So-and-So,” and if he seems “confident in his words,” and speaks in the style of “I have brought you the truth, believe,” if he speaks assertively, and overshadows his opponents with his charisma, neutralizing their counterarguments with all known rhetorical techniques and tricks such as allegory, hyperbolization, translation of the topic, personalization, and the like - thousands of them.

So, you ask a person this question: “Vasily, what do you think, why is there summer and winter?”
At first, a person is usually completely sure that he knows the answer to this question, and begins to answer: “Well, how?! What do you mean why?! Everyone knows this: of course, because the Earth’s axis is tilted!”

In principle, this answer already contains the whole point - the words “everyone knows this.”
The classic school training system works here: Masha “knows” the answer to the question, Masha gets an “A”. In fact, a school is the same religious zombie institution as any parish theological seminary in the Middle Ages.
The person simply does not perceive the question that way.
Instead of “Do you know why Something like this?” he hears “But you don’t know, as they usually tell us, why Something Such and Such?”
That is, a person accepts the virtual reality that society has imposed on him as the real state of affairs, and at the same time sacredly believes in it, and automatically considers any doubt in it (society has developed this reflex) to be heresy.
It looks very funny from the outside, for example, when a person’s head is full of misconceptions that he does not question and firmly believes in, and when you try to explain to him something that goes beyond the framework, or something that challenges his beliefs, then a person, in especially advanced cases, immediately begins to demand “facts” and does not want to listen, much less believe. It is not without reason that they say that the best slave is the one who is completely sure that he is not a slave. And if a person comes across a low level of development (there are such people, just look at today’s crazy fascist Ukraine), then he will even begin to attack you, put pressure on you, aggressively and zealously defending his own virtual reality from destruction. For an analogy, imagine a slave who is confident that he is free, and at the same time zealously protects his master-enslaver.
This, of course, is not the person’s fault: people are designed this way, it is their nature, and there is nothing shameful in this. And no one is immune from this.

Returning to the question you asked, the fun begins when you answer the interlocutor that he cannot build a normal logical chain from the mantra from the “tilted axis” to the answer to the question asked, and that he, therefore, does not know the answer to this question.
Based on the reaction, one can make judgments about the person himself: will he behave aggressively in response, will he go into deep defense, inaccessible to logic, etc. In especially difficult and rare cases, after you reveal the correct answer, the person is so afraid of being wrong that he commits self-deception, and assures both you and himself that he said so from the very beginning.
Fear of error is programmed into human nature as a defense necessary in the early stages of the development of consciousness, but at the same time it is also one of the main factors hindering human development after passing through the initial stage of development.

Regarding the answer to the question itself...
By intuition, of course, one can assume (and take on faith the noodles that are being hung on everyone’s ears somewhere) that because one pole, due to the tilt of the Earth, is always further from the Sun than the other, and therefore it is summer in one hemisphere , and in the other - winter.
And some people are sure that this distance is the reason for winter and summer. In fact, such a small distance of one pole compared to the other is not capable of providing a temperature difference (and if suddenly there is such a difference, then it is negligibly small).

The whole point is that the hemisphere that is tilted outward receives the same light, only at more slippery angles to the surface, and the hemisphere that is tilted inward receives light at angles that are steeper to the surface of the Earth.
Therefore, per unit area of the earth's surface in the cold hemisphere there is less incident sunlight than per the same unit area of the earth's surface in the hot hemisphere: for example, in the picture below you can clearly see that the “blue” part of the light, which falls on the cold hemisphere, almost half the size of the “yellow” part of the world, which falls in the hot hemisphere - that is why (and no other reason) it is hot in the hot hemisphere at this time of year, and cold in the cold hemisphere at this time of year.

If you are familiar with the concept of a “solid angle” (the same geometric two-dimensional angle, only expanded to the concept of three-dimensional space - you get something like a cone)

, then I will tell you this: the same unit of area of the earth's surface receives a smaller share of light (and, therefore, less heat) in the cold hemisphere, because there the solid angle from the sun to this unit of surface will be smaller; and vice versa, the same unit of earth's surface area receives a larger share of light (and, therefore, more heat) in the hot hemisphere, because there the solid angle from the sun to this unit of surface will be greater.

If there are astronomers among you who need mathematical formulas, then you can find them on this page: in the “intensity” section, a formula is immediately given that relates the radiation intensity and the solid angle to the site. Here is a formula for making my speech pompous and official, and for increasing the “persuasiveness” of my reasoning

Since the intensity of sunlight is the same at any point in space (this is, by definition, a property of the intensity of a star’s radiation in astronomy), the energy transmitted by sunlight to the Earth’s surface depends only on the solid angle from the Sun to a unit area of the Earth’s surface: the larger the solid angle angle, the more energy it contains.

To refute the misconception that there is winter and summer because one hemisphere, due to the tilt, turns out to be a little further than the other, you can come up with some visual and obvious refutations in the style of “paradoxes”.

For example, what is the Earth's orbit around the Sun? Your interlocutor, of course, will answer that, naturally, it is ellipsoidal. And he will draw an ellipse on paper, so elongated. Where is the Sun located inside this ellipse? Your interlocutor will probably say that it’s in the center (an intuitive answer, that’s how we were all drawn in children’s books). Ask again if it is exactly there. If he is sure, then notice that, in fact, not in the center, but in one of the foci of the ellipse. If the ellipse is drawn very elongated, then the Sun will be strongly shifted to one side. Ok, if the Earth's orbit is a drawn elongated ellipse, and a small difference in the distances to each hemisphere due to the tilt of the Earth's axis of rotation would affect the temperature so much, then why, when we pass those two points of the ellipse that are closest to the Sun, Doesn't every living thing on Earth burn up?

In fact, technically, your interlocutor dropped the correct phrase: technically, it is approximately an ellipse. Although in fact I would say that you are unlikely to distinguish it from a circle, because the eccentricity of this ellipse is 0.0167, and its largest diameter is 149.60 million kilometers, and the smallest is 149.58 million kilometers, that is, the difference in diameters - only about 20 thousand kilometers, that is, a little more than one tenth of a percent.

The sun is located at one of the focuses of this ellipse, and therefore is slightly shifted to one side.
(in the picture below, the ellipse, apparently for dramatic reasons, is unnaturally elongated in width - do not forget that in fact the Earth’s orbit is indistinguishable from a circle by eye)

If we now return to the question you asked your interlocutor about why everything did not burn up at the points of the ellipse that are closest to the Sun, then we can say that we now know that the Earth’s orbit is in fact a circle, and these points are closest to the Sun by only 10,000 kilometers, which is approximately equal to the diameter of the Earth, and therefore not so dramatic. Ok, I have a couple more paradoxes up my sleeve...

Now you can dig into the difference in distances from the Sun to the Earth in summer and winter (see picture). Ask your interlocutor that if his theory is correct, then why in July, that is, when it is summer in our hemisphere, the Earth is further from the Sun, and in January, when we have winter, the Earth, on the contrary, is closer to the Sun?

Further, if you count: 152,100,000 km - 147,300,000 km =~ 5,000,000 km. Five million kilometers - this is the difference in distances from the Earth to the Sun in summer and winter. If your interlocutor claims that the tiny difference in distances given by the tilt of the Earth’s axis somehow affects the temperature, then let’s calculate it - it will certainly not be greater than the diameter of the Earth, which is 12,742 km. Now compare a distance of ten thousand kilometers, which supposedly creates winter and summer, and a distance of five million kilometers, which, in this case, would freeze everything into permafrost or burn all living things. Ten thousand kilometers and five million kilometers. Millions, Karl!

And one more, last, fact that I noticed from a series of refutations of this false theory, which everyone firmly believes in: if only distance really played a role, then in this case one of the poles would completely melt once every six months, and an oasis would form there.

Here is another link, from the encyclopedia for children.

(short correct answer: because the earth's axis is tilted, and therefore much more light falls on one of the hemispheres than on the other, and they smoothly change places after six months)

I came home, started googling, researching, and discovered the answer to this seemingly simple, but in fact simply wonderful and brilliant in its simplicity question.

It turned out that they can have fun testing people: watching how a person will behave when you ask him this question, and in public, so that others can hear, but not be able to interfere.

If you are familiar with the concept of a “solid angle” (the same geometric two-dimensional angle, only expanded to the concept of three-dimensional space - you get something like a cone)

Here is another link, from the encyclopedia for children.

We are accustomed to the seasons changing. Winter is replaced by spring, followed by summer, and then autumn... For us, this is a common occurrence.

Changing the temperature

In winter we freeze from the cold. And it's hot for us in the summer. We eagerly await the arrival of warmth. However, the transition period when the temperature becomes most comfortable for us, as a rule, does not last very long. And the hot, dry summer comes. There is a fairly sharp change in temperature.

As a rule, we are busy with our daily affairs and do not think about why this happens. Why is it cold in winter and hot in summer? What influences this change of seasons?

Why is winter cold?

We all know from our school years that our Earth rotates around the Sun and around its own axis. Naturally, during its movement the planet either approaches the Sun or, on the contrary, moves away from it.

We have a stereotype that winter comes when the Earth is at the farthest distance from the source of heat and light. But it is not so. After all, there is another important factor - the Earth's tilt axis.

It passes through the North and South Pole. It turns out that when the angle of inclination moves away from the luminary, the day becomes short, the rays of the Sun seem to glide along a tangent and do not warm the surface so well. As a result of this, winter comes to us.

Why is it hot in summer?

But in the summer the opposite happens. As soon as the northern part of the Earth is at the closest distance from the Sun, it receives a huge amount of rays, daylight hours increase, air temperature increases very quickly, and summer comes.

In summer, the rays of the Sun fall on the earth's surface almost perpendicularly. Therefore, the energy is more concentrated and heats the soil very quickly. Because in summer it’s hot, there’s a lot of sun. In winter, the sun's rays seem to glide across the surface; they cannot warm up either the soil or the water. The air remains cold.

It turns out that in summer the flow of energy falling on the earth’s surface is much stronger and greater, and in winter it becomes smaller and weaker... Temperature indicators depend on this. In addition, we know that in summer the length of daylight hours is much longer than in winter. This means that the Sun has a lot of time to heat the Earth’s surface.

Changing seasons by zone

If summer begins in the northern hemisphere, then it is winter in the southern hemisphere, because at this time it is far from the Sun. The same thing happens in the second half of the year: it becomes much warmer and even hot in the southern hemisphere, and winter sets in in the northern hemisphere.

Meanwhile, different zones of the Earth have completely different climatic conditions. This is explained by proximity or distance from the equator. The closer you are to it, the hotter the climate, and vice versa, the further you are from it, the colder the climate conditions.

In addition, the weather is influenced by many factors. This is both proximity to the sea and altitude relative to the level of the World Ocean. After all, the mountains are quite cool even in summer, and there is snow on the peaks even in the heat.

Of course, the equator is an imaginary line running through the center of the Earth. But it is closest to the Sun, regardless of the axis tilt of our planet. It is for this reason that regions near the equator are constantly languishing from excess amounts of energy. The temperature here does not fall below twenty-four degrees. It's not only hot here in the summer. There is no winter in our understanding at all. The sun's rays strike the surface near the equator at almost a right angle, which gives the earth's surface in this region the maximum amount of light and heat.

Climate warming

Summer weather always pleases us with warmth, an abundance of sunny days, and long daylight hours. However, each season there is the establishment of abnormally hot weather for some time in regions uncharacteristic for such temperatures. This instantly sparks talk of “global warming.” Scientists argue a lot about this issue. Some paint downright threatening pictures of the future of this phenomenon. Others don't see anything wrong with it. However, everyone is still trying to unravel the cause of this phenomenon. There are quite a lot of assumptions. But there is no single reliable and correct one. Therefore, you should just enjoy the summer warmth and sun, sea and flowers, river and hot sand. After all, summer passes so quickly. And you can tolerate excessively hot weather, it’s worth it. But so many wonderful things await us at this time; nature beckons us to relax and enjoy life.

If you are interested in this question and are looking for an answer to this question, then after reading this article you will definitely find the answer.

Why is it so cold in winter?

The temperature in winter directly depends not on the distance of the planet to the Sun, but on the angle of inclination of the Earth. The tilt axis of our planet passes through 2 poles: South and North. While the angle of inclination moves the Northern Hemisphere away from the Sun, the days become shorter, the sun's rays fall less on the earth's surface and warm it up worse. As a result of such phenomena, winter comes.

Why is it so hot in summer?

In summer, everything happens the other way around - the North Pole is at a very close distance to the Sun, due to this, it receives the maximum amount of sunlight, the days become longer, and the air temperature increases. As a result of such phenomena, summer comes.

Why is it so much warmer in summer than in winter? In summer, the sun's rays hit the Earth perpendicularly, due to this, solar energy is more concentrated and warms the soil faster than usual, so it is very hot in summer. In winter, these same rays do not fall perpendicularly to the earth's surface; they glide without warming up either the soil or the water. The air does not heat up and remains just as cold. In summer, the flow of solar energy is much greater than in winter, then it weakens and becomes smaller.