41–50 of 67 posts
It's a bit like taking that sinusoid and integrating it resulting in a cosine shifted by a quarter of a phase.
”Winter was short, this year”. “Spring came early”. It does not make sense to tie these concepts to a calendar. Summer is when you dare to dip your toes in the ocean. In winter we have a meter of ice. I generally place vacation weeks in July and august, because the weather is nice and other people are on vacation as well. The statement that the seasons are wrong, does not make sense. To tie these names to a calendar,…
Australia calls December "summer". If climate patterns changed and shifted our weather patterns by a month, we'd shift our season vernacular to match.
Seasons refer to the climate we experience. They're a human experience, not calendar slot.
“One sort of optional thing you might do is realize that there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn, and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier…
Round here (GB) the standard, as reflected in decorative calendars and the like, seems to be: Spring: Mar, Apr, May Summer: Jun, Jul, Aug Autumn: Sep, Oct, Nov Winter: Dec, Jan, Feb Works for me.
Moving from the US to the UK, one of the first things I noticed was that the colloquial understanding of the seasons mapped much more cleanly onto what actually happens with the weather here. Growing up in the midwest of the US the seasons all felt off in the same way the author describes.
Round here (GB) the standard, as reflected in decorative calendars and the like, seems to be: Spring: Mar, Apr, May Summer: Jun, Jul, Aug Autumn: Sep, Oct, Nov Winter: Dec, Jan, Feb Works for me.
It feels like it's never going to end!
Do you want to define the seasons by temperature? Or by lengthening of the day? Because, to me, seasons are tied to weather in general, but temperature specifically. And temperature seems to correlates to length of day, but trails it by about a month. Which makes sense, since it takes time to heat/cool the enormous thermal mass. So, if weather is how you track the changing of the seasons, it’s close enough to correct…
There's a lot that we associate with seasons. But the quote somewhere above about six seasons with locking before winter and unlocking after does feel like a better fit to me.
1) The Darkness: November 6 to February 4 (the dates are midpoints in the current seasons)
2) The Brightening: February 4 to May 5
3) The Brightness: May 5 to August 6.
4) The Darkening: August 6 to November 6
Round here (GB) the standard, as reflected in decorative calendars and the like, seems to be: Spring: Mar, Apr, May Summer: Jun, Jul, Aug Autumn: Sep, Oct, Nov Winter: Dec, Jan, Feb Works for me.
Do you want to define the seasons by temperature? Or by lengthening of the day? Because, to me, seasons are tied to weather in general, but temperature specifically. And temperature seems to correlates to length of day, but trails it by about a month. Which makes sense, since it takes time to heat/cool the enormous thermal mass. So, if weather is how you track the changing of the seasons, it’s close enough to correct…
There's a big difference between 40-50°F in November, when the trees are brown and barren, and you're looking ahead to winter, and you swear there's a hint of frost in the air...
...and 40-50°F in April, when the leafbuds are coming out, and the geese are flying back north, and is that a crocus coming up over there?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Ireland, in February, the days warm up often into the double digits, galanthus are flowering, grass begins to take on its spring green, and I am to believe that this is still the depths of winter. No, rejected. Dismissing this article as "American" is misguided at best.
No, late february is not the depths of winter, it's the very end of winter
In Upstate New York (from which I have just moved), February is the depths of winter. The temperature there can plunge to -10°F (for the highs) for a week straight. It's not until early April that you're really guaranteed to see things thawing for good. (March can be a crapshoot; sometimes it's looking like spring, with warm breezes and birds returning, and other times you get 4 feet of snow dumped on you. In the same week.)
The maritime climate of the British Isles makes an enormous difference to the climate they experience—certainly as compared to the continental US, and to a lesser degree as compared to continental Europe. It's actually kind of fascinating teasing apart which of our cultural truisms about seasons originated on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, vs which ones were developed once we had colonized the New World.