Results tagged “northernhemisphere”

Nice late summer day, don't you think? Enjoy the warm, sunny goodness while you can because tomorrow is going to be decidedly less sunny, and a bit cooler. A cold front that currently stretches from Lake Superior, down to the Gulf Coast, and west to Arizona, is going to sweep through town tomorrow night. Ahead of that front we can expect showers and perhaps a thunderstorm, starting around daybreak tomorrow. The front is moving fast and the showers should be gone by the time we wake up on Wednesday. Once the front passes by, the sun will return but the warmth will not. Highs on Wednesday and Thursday will struggle to make 70. The first weekend of fall looks to be slightly warmer.

The beginning of spring depends on how you define the season. Astronomically speaking, spring begins two weeks from today, when the Sun will be directly overhead at the equator. If you are into accounting spring began on March 1st. By convention, official weather records consider the three months of March-May as spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This is solely to make climate comparisons between years and locations possible. More organically, spring is when temperatures begin to rise and cyclonic activity, or storminess, begins to decrease. On average winter temperatures in New York bottom out in mid-January, slowly rise through February before taking off in early-March.

The Times has a good article about the traffic nightmare that occurs at the intersection of Flatbush, Atlantic, and Fourth Avenues in Brooklyn, and comes up with some great facts:

As Gothamist looks into our crystal ball we see nothing but blue skies through next Sunday. After a week in which Hurricane Ivan killed 52 people in the U.S., Hurricane Jeanne killed at least 90 in Haiti, flooding upstate and in New Jersey, and a fried West 4th St station on Saturday, we are grateful for the blue skies.

The Earth was at aphelion yesterday. Aphelion is the greatest distance the Earth gets from the Sun. From now until January 2nd, when perihelion occurs, we'll be getting a little bit closer to the Sun every day. Like the rings of dust that circle Saturn the Earth's orbit is not perfectly circular. Instead we have a slightly eccentric orbit. Gothamist and the rest of the Earth were 152.6 million km away from the Sun yesterday and will be 147.5 million km away come January. Since we are slightly farther from the Sun in July, the Earth receives a little less sunlight than in January.

With the most excitement for a planet in our solar system aside from Earth and aside from school age bathroom humor standby, Uranus, Mars has been on the brain. It's (scary?) proximity to Earth this morning and its mythology in our culture have made it Must-See-Planet of the week. The Hubble Space Telescape has taken some beautiful photographs.