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Well, it's not like starting winter on December 1 isn't a lie as well – average "meteorological winter" starts Dec 8, a week later. The coldest quarter is also,
by rquantz 11y ago
Well, it's not like starting winter on December 1 isn't a lie as well – average "meteorological winter" starts Dec 8, a week later. The coldest quarter is also, of course, different every year, and not known until after the fact.
We use astronomical seasons instead because they are predictable, they are basically the same every year, and they definitively take place on a given date.
For the question of starting winter on the solstice vs halfway between solstice and equinox, we do get more cold weather after solstice than before. I think this is less important though – starting halfway between has made sense to me ever since I was a kid and learned what solstice and equinox meant.
- famous 11y agoA well-intentioned lie! Actually I'd call it more of an approximation. And the meteorological definition (Dec-Feb) is a better approximation of the coldest quarter than is starting the season on the solstice or on the cross-quarter day, in early November. You cite predictability and definitiveness of starting the season on the solstice, but the meteorological season is better there, too.
- rquantz 11y agoNot actually, because in reality the coldest dates are different every year, and may change with global warming to boot. Start talking about meteorological seasons, and we can start arguing about what data to use. Does every climate region get their own definition of winter? Or do we use a one size fits all definition for an entire hemisphere? Do we go with an average of surface temperatures since they've been recorded, or do we use a running average of the last ten or twenty years? Do we use only surface temperatures, or should we take ocean temperatures into account as well? And then you say, well, we'll just do an approximation and say Dec 1, but then you've chosen a truly arbitrary date that, again, is just as approximate to the "actual" meteorological date as Dec 22, and is off by close to the same amount. Edit: because this post sounds pretty vehement, I just want to leaven it by saying that I recognize that all of these things are essentially arbitrary and this is not, in the end, a topic that is actually extremely important to me. I do think it's worthwhile to point out that the meteorological seasons are not as clearly better as this article makes them out to be. There are reasons for using astronomical winter, and they aren't really any worse than the reasons for using meteorological winter, as far as I can tell.