A Season For Everything
Posted by PintofStout on December 21st, 2009
The solstice has been on the brain. First the poem, now a whole new post. This post isn’t specifically about the solstice alone, but about all four points of inflection upon the ellipse of Earth’s orbit. We mark our seasons by these inflections, one season terminating and another beginning at these orbital points: the equinoxes in spring and fall and the solstices in summer and winter. But what most people associate with the seasons are actually the weather and not the position of the sun in relation to the horizon, which of course are related, but weather being very tangible.
Let’s call the season delineations we currently have the astronomical seasons for obvious reasons. The weather associated with the astronomical seasons (the weather season) don’t fall neatly into the delineated times, though. One season’s associated weather likely bleeds into the preceding season giving the appearance that the season’s weather arrives first, like a Secret Service security team before a presidential stump speech. That is because the weather is greatly affected, if not wholly produced, by the angle of the sun. The astronomical season markers are marking extremes, meaning both sides of the extreme will be very similar. If we had weather-delineated seasons, these markers should fall precisely in the middle. Winter would encompass the months of December, January, and February; Spring would consist of March, April, and May; Summer containing June, July, and August; and leaving Autumn with September, October, and November.
Of course, weather is messy. Down in the dirty chaos of atmosphere, moisture, dirt, and wind there are no specific points to demarcate a change in seasons based solely on weather. Perhaps this is why it would be best to not delineate the seasons so much as simply mark the progress of the year with those four extreme days. But knowing us humans, it is always about us and what we want and what we feel and how something affects us with little regard to facts or logic. So we’ll continue to have wintry weather in late fall and summery weather in late spring, etc, etc.
