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US seasons have been off by a month or more. Year after year Winter weather has continued into mid-April. If the powers that be can move our clocks by an hour, how about shifting the seasons by a month? Or making Winter & Summer longer and Fall & Spring shorter since the weather transitions have occurred more quickly?
Seasons are based on the location of the sun and length of day, not temperatures.
FWIW if I wanted to cover this from the perspective of Astronomy and Keplers Laws, Then I would have placed this in the Science Forum. But its narrow thinking just to think current weather patterns and temperatures are solely based on the location of the Earth in relation to the Sun. So does anyone else think the season lengths need to be adjusted based on the past few decades?
FWIW if I wanted to cover this from the perspective of Astronomy and Keplers Laws, Then I would have placed this in the Science Forum. But its narrow thinking just to think current weather patterns and temperatures are solely based on the location of the Earth in relation to the Sun. So does anyone else think the season lengths need to be adjusted based on the past few decades?
Okay so temperature wise then wouldn't the seasons have to start at different times for different places in the US, which would cause confusion? Since there probably isn't going to be winter weather in say, Tennessee in April while it could be snowing in Minnesota till May. Also as far as I know winters aren't ending any later than they used to, actually spring is generally coming earlier. This year was an exception of course, but then look at last year where winter pretty much ended on March 1st. Anything can happen in March so it's really hard to say when spring is "supposed" to start.
Winter isn't based on temperatures. Spring began on March 20, so it's spring everywhere. The beginning of spring is always cold. The weather won't get warm overnight. Anyways, here in SoCal it's a perfect 70F and sunny!
The definition of the season is the celestial position of the sun. The normal temperatures is just the empirical evidence of the conditions that often result from those and other conditions the often occur at that time.
Redefining the seasons based on the observable symptoms of the condition would be equal to redefining gender based on dress or hair style. Just because it often appears one way on males does not mean a women in a tux with a crew cut became a man.
Assuming that "winter" is defined as "snowpack persistently on the ground" (as it should be) instead of "possibly a dusting of snow and a light freeze", there are very few places in the United States outside of Alaska that have winter until April, and even then the snowpack is typically melting. Even as far north as Minneapolis the snowpack is gone by April (temps avg 57/37F), and in Chicago it's long gone (temps avg 59/42F). There are places in the lower 48 that are colder than southern Minnesota, but they comprise a tiny percentage of the lower 48's land area, so they can hardly be said to be representative of the United States as a whole.
Rolla, Missouri is close to the mean center of U.S. population, and with an average of 39/20F in January, getting a persistent snowpack in winter is an iffy thing, let alone in April, when it averages 67/45F. The geographic center of the U.S., Concordia, Kansas, has the same issues. If any season is off in the U.S. as a whole I'd say it's summer, which runs long in most of the U.S. Rolla, Missouri averages 79/58F in September, which is still summer-like. However, I wouldn't say that's a case of a season being "off" - long to be sure, but the hottest month on average is still July.
As for the powers that be changing the length of the seasons, that would not be comparable to Daylight Saving Time. DST is stupid, but it would be like the government trying to change the day length (they cannot - all DST does is shift it one hour later), or changing the length of the hour by statute, or some other stupid policy like that. You cannot change nature by legislative fiat, and that includes seasons. No matter how much you tinker with how you measure time, what you're measuring will remain the same.
Seems temps were a lot warmer a year ago than this year across much of the US.
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