Tweet
Large land masses tend to have greater extremes of weather compared to small islands, because they miss out on the moderating effects of the water mass, explained previously on this thread.
Think of central europe/asia, such as Stalingrad, without the massive heatsink of an ocean nearby its temperature drops to frightening levels during the winter and can be warm enough in summer to be quite sweaty.
As for continuing to get colder after winter solstice that is easy to explain.
The rate at which heat is lost from the winter part of the planet exceeds the rate at which it is gained from the sun.
From summer solstice the temperature gain rate from the sun decreases and the loss rate stays the same, but the time over which it occurs gets longer.
After the solstice while the rate of gain starts to go up it is lagging behind the loss rate.
The gain catches up with the loss during March and overtakes it, thus temperature starts to climb towards summer.
The mechanism which alters the gain is the tilt of the earth which brings the sun closer to the horizon and thus spreads the available sunlight over a greater area. Hold a sheet of paper up at rightangles to the light from a reading lamp so that the light shines on half of the paper. You can then make the same amount of light cover the whole of the paper merely by altering the angle it is at in relation to the lamp.
Think of central europe/asia, such as Stalingrad, without the massive heatsink of an ocean nearby its temperature drops to frightening levels during the winter and can be warm enough in summer to be quite sweaty.
As for continuing to get colder after winter solstice that is easy to explain.
The rate at which heat is lost from the winter part of the planet exceeds the rate at which it is gained from the sun.
From summer solstice the temperature gain rate from the sun decreases and the loss rate stays the same, but the time over which it occurs gets longer.
After the solstice while the rate of gain starts to go up it is lagging behind the loss rate.
The gain catches up with the loss during March and overtakes it, thus temperature starts to climb towards summer.
The mechanism which alters the gain is the tilt of the earth which brings the sun closer to the horizon and thus spreads the available sunlight over a greater area. Hold a sheet of paper up at rightangles to the light from a reading lamp so that the light shines on half of the paper. You can then make the same amount of light cover the whole of the paper merely by altering the angle it is at in relation to the lamp.
Comment