Is summer solstice starting one month early?

  • Thread starter Thread starter lotsofques
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Summer
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
Sign up Log in
5 replies · 6K views
lotsofques
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Sunrise is at 5:30am and sunset is at 8:30pm and it is only May 30th. That is 3 weeks early for summer solstice. Is the first day of summer going to be longer this year? Also on the east coast it was the hottest it has been since 1885. Is there any pattern to the heat waves or is everything just random? Thank you for any answers I can get.
 

Discussion

Earth sciences news on Phys.org
While Evo's link is close it simply does not answer the question.

It is good that you are observing sunrise and sunset times; however you need to make more observations. What you will find is that the day length will change very little between now and the solstice. If fact it will not start changing again until about a month after the solstice. The day length changes rapidly for about a month each side of the equinox in Sept and March. It changes very slowly for a month on each side of the solstices in June and Dec.

If you continue making observations you will discover some interesting things. You will discover that the earliest sunrise and the latest sunset do not occur on the solstice. They are offset several weeks each side. For more info Google the "equation of time".
 
Uh, I would point out that we're currently in the transition period between elNino/laNina phases of the global weather cycle, when weirdness often happens.

What's happening beyond the Arctic Circle is another, much-disputed matter entirely.
 
lotsofques said:
Sunrise is at 5:30am and sunset is at 8:30pm and it is only May 30th. That is 3 weeks early for summer solstice. Is the first day of summer going to be longer this year? Also on the east coast it was the hottest it has been since 1885. Is there any pattern to the heat waves or is everything just random? Thank you for any answers I can get.

The solstice is getting earlier, but not by much. It will take some 71 years to occur one day earlier. This is due to what is called the "precession of the equinox".

As to your question asking if everything is random. No, it is not. However, we simply don't know enough about what causes such things as heat waves to predict them very accurately. Leaning enough to do so is one of the major purposes of the atmospheric sciences.