When Will Days Get Longer Again?
December 22nd. The day after the winter solstice.
This would be an extremely short article, but you actually don’t start noticing it right away.
Short Days and Long Nights
I have this theory, it involves holiday lights and the shortest days of the year.
The addition of twinkling lights on every corner helps us get through the time of year in which there is a severe lack of natural lighting.
That’s the theory– I know, wild.
But it gets deeper.
The reason we leave lights up after the festivities come to an end, is that we need that extra little bit of light until our bodies start noticing the change.
It’ll take you a couple weeks to notice the days are getting longer. And there are a few reasons for that.
First, the latest sunrise of the year isn’t on the solstice– it’s during the first week of January.
Second, the differences in total daylight each day only vary by a few seconds around the solstice! Not until more than a week later do we start to see changes in total daylight of more than 30 seconds.
In fact, by the time we hit the second week in January the length of daylight increases by almost a minute each day.
Moral of the Story
Leave those holiday lights up through the first week of the new year to help ease your fellow humans through the longest nights of the year.
For WeatherNation — Meteorologist Jeremy LaGoo