Inflection Day
Inflection Day is our first Walden-Effect-created holiday.
Anna did the math and decided January 13 is, on average, the coldest
day of the year in our area. It's all uphill from here!
We looked at the weather and decided to observe the holiday one day early with a visit to Bays Mountain's park
and planetarium. We climbed a few hills, took in the watery
exhibits, and peered at a partly frozen lake. Thanks for sharing
the special day with us, Adrianne and Joey!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I'd like to point out that the Earth was at his perhelion on January 3rd. That's when Earth is closest to the Sun, and it is winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern hemisphere. Thus Earth's distance from the Sun does not affect what season occurs. Instead, Earth's seasons come and go because Earth does not rotate with its axis exactly upright with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. Earth's axial tilt is 23.4 degrees. This puts the Sun farther south in December and January, so the north has winter and the south has summer. Thus winter falls on that part of the globe where sunlight strikes least directly, and summer falls where sunlight strikes most directly, regardless of Earth's distance from the Sun.
So this means that it can only get warmer until around July 4th, when the Earth will be at aphelion (further's from the sun) and it's axis will be tilted towards the sun. Then it's downhill from there until January 3rd again!