In article .com, " wrote:
On Mar 6, 4:25 pm, (David Williams) wrote:
I dispute your contention that most of the northern hemisphere has a
British-type climate, rather than one like we have here.

That is your prerogative, but references on the 'net almost
universally support the original claim that meteorologists (in North
America too!) define winter as the calendar months December through
February. I don't doubt that there are many places where that doesn't
fit well with the local climate, but I simply don't believe it would
have become the meteorological convention if it didn't have widespread
applicability.

I think it has become convention, but not necessarily "meteorological
convention". In fact, I suspect the meteorologists have simply fallen
in line with marketing/economic/political realities.

In a day and age when, earlier this week, it took *four* attempts
before someone was able to correctly answer the radio trivia question
"What is the season that starts with the summer solstice and ends with
the autumnal equinox?" such astronomical definitions are clearly
meaningless to the population at large.

This really isn't a UK (or even Europe) versus America thing. Perhaps
we need to let the subject rest until we can find a tame meteorologist
to educate us properly.

Cheers, Phred.

--
LID

Phred wrote:

In article .com,
" wrote:
On Mar 6, 4:25 pm, (David Williams) wrote:
I dispute your contention that most of the northern hemisphere has a
British-type climate, rather than one like we have here.

That is your prerogative, but references on the 'net almost
universally support the original claim that meteorologists (in North
America too!) define winter as the calendar months December through
February. I don't doubt that there are many places where that doesn't
fit well with the local climate, but I simply don't believe it would
have become the meteorological convention if it didn't have widespread
applicability.

I think it has become convention, but not necessarily "meteorological
convention". In fact, I suspect the meteorologists have simply fallen
in line with marketing/economic/political realities.

In a day and age when, earlier this week, it took *four* attempts
before someone was able to correctly answer the radio trivia question
"What is the season that starts with the summer solstice and ends with
the autumnal equinox?" such astronomical definitions are clearly
meaningless to the population at large.

This really isn't a UK (or even Europe) versus America thing. Perhaps
we need to let the subject rest until we can find a tame meteorologist
to educate us properly.


About forty years ago, I was producing northern hemisphere ice charts and
needed an average date for starting summing both negative and positive
degree-day summation in that area. The first needed the average date of
maximum temperature and the latter the date of minimum. Using climat data
for stations that dropped to near zero in winter, the average dates I came
up with were 20th July and 21st January. Now these, to tie in with 10-day
issue of our ice charts, were chosen to coincide with the start of the
10-day periods. I dimly recall that they would have been a few days earlier
if this constraint hadn't been in force.

These dates fall in the middle of the three-month summer and winter seasons
of JJA and DJF. This shows that these seasons are positioned logically -
unlike basing seasons on solstices or equinoxes - but I can see that the
lengths might not seem appropriate everywhere.

--
Graham P Davis
Bracknell, Berks., UK
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