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

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

Why is it so cold in winter?

The temperature in winter does not directly depend on the distance of the planet to the Sun, but on the angle 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 day becomes shorter, the sun's rays fall less on the earth's surface and warm it worse. As a result of such phenomena, winter comes.

Why is it so hot in summer?

In summer, everything happens the other way around - North Pole turns out to be at a very close distance to the Sun, due to this, it receives the maximum amount of sunlight, the day becomes longer, the air temperature rises. As a result of such phenomena, summer comes.

Why is summer much warmer than 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, the same rays fall on the earth's surface not perpendicularly, they glide without warming up either the soil or the water. The air does not heat up, it remains cold. summer flow solar energy much more than in winter, then it weakens and becomes smaller.

(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 half a year)

Once I was asked this question at 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." They were still surprised, like, no one had ever answered like that before me.
It seems that they didn’t take me there, or didn’t write me later, xs, it was a long time ago.

I came home, began to google, study, and discovered the answer to this seemingly simple, but in fact - just a wonderful and ingenious question in its simplicity.

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

It has long been known that logic does not work for a person: everyone only adjusts and shuffles the facts in such a way as to concoct those answers, decisions and conclusions that best suit him and will not cause him cognitive dissonance that he is not he is right, that he is bad, that he is weak, that he made a mistake, that he was deceived, that he was mistaken, and so on.
And the persuasiveness of speech is perceived by others almost entirely on emotions, and not on facts: it doesn’t matter what nonsense the speaker will carry, if at the same time he looks adequate and “respectable”, preferably with a bunch of ranks like “Academician of Such and such an Academy” or " Honored Minister of So-and-so", and if he appears "confident in his words", and speaks in the style of "I brought you the truth, believe", if he speaks assertively and outshines his opponents with his charisma, neutralizing their counterarguments with all known rhetorical tricks and tricks such as allegory, hyperbolization, translation of the theme, transition to personalities, and the like - thousands of them.

So, you ask a person such a 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 it mean why?! Everyone knows this: of course, because the Earth's axis is tilted!".

In principle, this answer already contains all the salt - the words "everyone knows this."
The classical system of school training works here: Masha "knows" the answer to the question, Masha gets an A. In fact, the school is the same religious zombie institution, like some kind of parochial theological seminary in the Middle Ages.
A person simply does not perceive the question in such a way.
Instead of "Do you know why Something So-and-so?" he hears "But don't you know how they usually tell us why Something So-and-so?".
That is, for the real state of things, a person takes that virtual reality, which society imposed on him, and at the same time he firmly believes in it, and any doubt in it automatically (society has developed this reflex) considers 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 them, and when you try to explain to him something that goes beyond, or something that challenges his beliefs, that person, especially advanced cases, immediately begins to demand "facts", and does not want to listen, let alone believe. No wonder they say that the best slave is the one who is completely sure that he is not a slave. And if a person at the same time gets a low level of development (there are such people, just look at today's crazy fascist Ukraine), then he will start attacking you, putting pressure on you, aggressively and zealously protecting his own virtual reality from destruction. For an analogy, imagine a slave who is sure that he is free, and at the same time jealously defends his master-enslaver.
This, of course, is not the fault of man: people are so arranged, 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 question asked, and that he thus does not know the answer to this question.
Based on the reaction, one can make judgments about the person himself: whether he will behave aggressively in response, whether he will go into a deaf defense, inaccessible to logic, etc. In especially difficult and rare cases, after revealing the correct answer by you, the person is so afraid of being wrong that he goes to 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 protection 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. initial stage development.

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

The thing is that the hemisphere that is tilted outward receives the same light, only at more slippery angles to the surface, while the hemisphere that is tilted inward receives light at angles more steep to the surface of the Earth.
Therefore, per unit area earth's surface in the cold hemisphere there is a smaller amount of incident sunlight than the same unit area of ​​the earth's surface in the hot hemisphere: for example, the picture below clearly shows that the "blue" part of the world that falls on the cold hemisphere is almost half the "yellow" "part of the world that falls on the hot hemisphere - that is why (and for no other reason) in the hot hemisphere at this time of the year it is hot, and in the cold at this time of the year it is cold.

If you are familiar with the concept of "solid angle" (the same geometric two-dimensional angle, only extended to the concept of three-dimensional space - it turns out such a kind of cone)

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 you to make my speech pompous and official, and to increase the "persuasiveness" of my reasoning

To refute the misconception that there is winter and summer, because one hemisphere turns out to be slightly further than the other due to the tilt, you can come up with some clear and obvious rebuttals in the style of "paradoxes".

For example, what is the Earth's orbit around the Sun? Your interlocutor, of course, will answer that, of course, ellipsoidal. And draw an ellipse on paper, so elongated. Where is the Sun located inside this ellipse? Your interlocutor will probably say that in the center (an intuitive answer, this is 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 displaced to one side. OK, if the Earth's orbit is a drawn elongated ellipse, and the small difference in 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 up?

In fact, technically, your interlocutor dropped the correct phrase: technically, this is approximately an ellipse. Although in fact I would say that you can hardly 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.

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 calculate: 152,100,000 km - 147,300,000 km = ~ 5,000,000 km. Five million kilometers - such is the difference in distances from the Earth to the Sun in summer and winter. If your interlocutor claims that the meager difference in distances given by the slope earth's axis, somehow affects the temperature, then let's calculate it - it will certainly not be more than the diameter of the Earth, which is 12,742 km. Now compare a distance of ten thousand kilometers, which allegedly creates winter and summer, and a distance of five million kilometers, which, in this case, would freeze everything into permafrost or burn all life. Ten thousand kilometers and five million kilometers. Million Carl!

Here is another link, from an encyclopedia for children.

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

If you ask the question why it is cold in winter, the most common answer would be: the Sun has moved away from the Earth at 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 really approaches the star, then moves away. The maximum distance at which two celestial objects are located (in aphelion, speaking in scientific terms) is 152.1 million km, the minimum (in scientific terms it will be “in perehelion”) is 147.1. The formation of this opinion was influenced by the fact that the Earth has a spherical shape and moves in an orbit in the form of an oval. When the surfaces of the planet and the star move away, the sun's rays cease to carry their heat and therefore the temperature drops. The northern hemisphere is in this position from December to February.

Related materials:

Is it true that there is less oxygen in the air in winter?

Short day

But the arrival of cold time is affected not only by the distance between the Sun and the Earth. The axis of our planet is tilted with respect to the orbit, the angle of which is 23.5 degrees. The North Pole is always directed to a star called the Polaris, which causes 6 months of the Earth's tilt to the Sun and the same period of time - 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. In the aggregate of two facts, a decrease in temperature occurs, which leads to a decrease in evaporation. The concentration of water vapor is the main criterion for retaining heat near the surface, and its decrease leads to the escape of heated air into space. Lowering the temperature causes better dissolution in the atmosphere of carbonic acid, which is able to absorb infrared radiation. When its proportion decreases, thermal radiation occurs faster.

Related materials:

How do fish winter?

Winter and summer in different parts of the world

Winter in the northern hemisphere, summer in the southern hemisphere. And vice versa. This is because the northern hemisphere of the Earth tilts towards the Sun for one half of the year, and deviates for the other. Therefore, some celebrate the New Year and Christmas holidays when it is cold, while others celebrate it during the hot season.

But there is also such a thing as geographic zones. And the climate is different depending on the distance separating it from the equator - a conditional line dividing the planet into the northern and southern hemispheres. The equator is perpendicular to the axis of rotation of the Earth, 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 equals 24-28 degrees with a “+” sign. This part of the land receives more heat, light and solar radiation, because the rays fall at a right angle.

We know that our planet is spherical. Many children learn from childhood that this is why the distribution of heat on our planet is not uniform. At the same time, we all know that our planet constantly rotates around its axis. However, many people still have a question why it happens that not all the inhabitants of the planet get warm in summer. In addition, it remains unclear why it is cold in winter in some regions, while in others there is incredible heat.

Why is it so cold in winter

Many do not understand why in winter it is very hot in one part of the planet, and cold in another. As we noted at the beginning, in addition to rotating around the Sun, the Earth rotates around its axis. As the seasons change, the angle that forms between the orbit and the axis also makes some changes. This angle is 23 degrees and makes minor deviations during the year.

AT northern latitudes with the onset of winter, the rays begin, as it were, to glide over the surface of the northern hemisphere. In other words, the Sun is no longer at right angles to them. That is why the air temperature starts to drop. Our country is located in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, summer in the regions of our country comes when the sun's rays fall on them at a right angle.

Meanwhile, in some regions of Russia, for example, in the Krasnodar Territory, warm weather worth almost all year round. This is due to the fact that Krasnodar region located at a different latitude.

As for the countries where there is always heat, even in winter months, then their case is explained by their proximity to the equator. The sun's rays constantly fall on them perpendicularly. It should be noted that in countries with sharply continental climate The weather doesn't depend on the location the globe and time of year, but mainly from the activity of air currents.