It's warm in winter and warm in summer. Why is it warm in summer and cold in winter?

Everyone knows from school that our planet rotates both around the Sun and around its own axis - an imaginary line connecting two poles - north and south. This arrangement of things affects the changing seasons and time of day.

If you ask the question why it is cold in winter, the most common answer will be: the Sun has moved away from the Earth to the maximum possible distance. There is some truth in this statement, but only partially, because other factors also influence the change of seasons.

Causes of cold weather in winter

Distance

In the process of rotation, our planet actually approaches the star and then moves away. The maximum distance at which two celestial objects are located (at aphelion, if we speak in scientific terms) is 152.1 million km, the minimum (in scientific terms it will be “at perehelion”) is 147.1. The formation of this opinion was influenced by the fact that the Earth has a spherical shape and moves in orbit in the form of an oval. When the surfaces of the planet and star move away, the sun's rays stop delivering their heat and therefore the temperature drops. The Northern Hemisphere experiences this situation between December and February.

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Short day

But the arrival of cold weather is influenced not only by the distance between the Sun and Earth. The axis of our planet is tilted relative to the orbit, the angle of which is 23.5 degrees. The North Pole is always directed towards a star called Polaris, which causes the Earth to tilt towards the Sun for 6 months and the same period of time for the deviation of the planet from the star. Thus, the angle of inclination removes the surface, making the day shorter. The sun's rays simply do not have enough time to warm the Earth.

Change in the atmosphere

In addition, the Sun rises less high in the sky. The combination of two facts results in a decrease in temperature, which leads to a decrease in evaporation. The concentration of water vapor is the main criterion for heat retention at the surface; its decrease leads to the escape of heated air into space. A decrease in temperature causes better dissolution in the atmosphere of carbonic acid, which can absorb infrared radiation. When its proportion decreases, thermal radiation occurs faster.

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Winter and summer in different parts of the planet

In the northern hemisphere it is winter, in the southern hemisphere it is summer. And vice versa. This happens because for one half of the year the northern hemisphere of the Earth tilts towards the Sun, and for the second half it deviates. That's why some celebrate the New Year and Christmas holidays when it's cold, while others celebrate it when it's hot.

But there is also such a thing as geographical zones. And the climate varies depending on the distance separating it from the equator - the conventional line dividing the planet into the northern and southern hemispheres. The equator is perpendicular to the Earth's axis of rotation, so the angle of inclination is not decisive. The temperature in the regions passing along this conditional line is approximately the same throughout the year and is equal to 24-28 degrees with a “+” sign. This part of the land receives more heat, light and solar radiation, because the rays fall at right angles.

Why is it cold in winter and warm in summer? and got the best answer

Answer from Oblom[guru]
due to the fact that the earth is round and rotating on an axis around the sun, read the textbook

Answer from cornflower[guru]
It’s warm in the summer, because everyone walks around lightly dressed, some in just thongs, which heats up the air, but in winter, on the contrary, they put on fur coats and there’s nowhere for the air to get warm, so it gets cold...

Answer from *** [guru]
The thing is that there are 4 seasons and their change is caused by the rotation of planet Earth around the Sun. This happens in 365 (366) days, but at the same time the Earth also manages to rotate around its axis every 24 hours. This is how the days change.
If the Earth's axis (the imaginary line from the North to the South Pole) were at right angles to the Earth's orbit around the Sun, we would have no seasons and all days would be the same. But the Earth's axis is tilted.
The fact is that various forces act on the Earth. Firstly, this is the attraction of the Sun, secondly, the attraction of the Moon, and thirdly, the rotation of the Earth itself. As a result, the Earth rotates around the Sun in an inclined position. This position persists all year round, so the Earth's axis is always directed to one point - the North Star.
This means that part of the year the North Pole is turned towards the Sun, and the second part is hidden from it. Because of this tilt, the direct rays of the Sun sometimes illuminate the area of the Earth's surface north of the equator, sometimes at the equator, sometimes south of the equator. It is the varying exposure of areas of the earth's surface to direct sunlight that causes the seasons to change in different areas of the globe.
That is, winter occurs in the Southern Hemisphere if direct sunlight hits the Northern Hemisphere and vice versa. During winter, the sun illuminates both hemispheres, but some of the rays are scattered, so they are not able to warm the hemisphere to the same extent. This is what causes the cold in winter.
Isn't it strange: when winter reigns in the northern hemisphere, the Earth is 4,500,000 km closer to the Sun than when it is summer there.
The fact is that in this case the weather is determined not by the distance from our planet to the Sun, but by the inclination of the earth's axis relative to the plane of the earth's orbit. The angle of this inclination is 23.5 degrees.
The Earth rotates around the sun in such a way that its axis is always directed towards the North Star. Therefore, during one half of the year the North Pole of the earth tilts towards the Sun, and during the other half it deviates from it. In the first case, summer reigns in the Northern Hemisphere, in the second - winter. In South, of course, everything is the other way around.
The weather in a particular region of the earth depends on the angle at which the sun's rays fall on a given area of the earth's surface. In winter, the low sun illuminates the earth with sliding rays, and in summer they fall vertically. Grazing rays heat the Earth's surface less for two reasons. Firstly, because the same amount of heat is distributed over a larger area in winter than in summer. Secondly, in this case the rays pass through a thicker layer of air in the earth’s atmosphere, which leads to large losses of their thermal energy.
Climate is determined not only by the amount of heat entering a particular area of the Earth's surface from the Sun, but also by other factors. For example, in the vast seas and in the areas adjacent to them, temperature changes with the changing seasons are not so great. On the contrary, in the interior of the continents the difference between winter and summer temperatures is much greater. This occurs due to the fact that the earth cools and heats up much faster than water. Another factor influencing the weather is the difference in altitude above sea level. As altitude increases, air density decreases, and therefore its ability to retain heat decreases. As a result, the climate in mountainous areas is much colder than in the plains.

(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 does why mean?! 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 all life on Earth burn?

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.

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 hit 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.

(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.