What Causes Seasons?

Question

i'm confused, i know it's the tilt of the earths axs, but can u explain y you know the drawings are compared to the not\rth and south hemishpere? Help me please!

Answer 1

The Earth is tilted on it's axis. As it goes around the Sun, it tilts in one way, then moves to tilt the other way. So sometimes the northern hemisphere is pointed more towards the sun, and sometimes the southern hemisphere is. During the summer in the northern hemisphere, the tilt of the earth means that the sun is up longer and gets higher overhead, so we get more sunlight (and heat). During the winter in the northern hemisphere, the sun is up for a smaller amount of time and we get less heat - but the southern hemisphere is getting more, so it's summer down there. The equator gets about the same amount of sunlight year-round, since they are in the middle, so it's always warm there. The north and south poles can go 6 months without seeing the sun at all - so it's very cold there.

Answer 2

Because of the tilt of the Earth the INTENSITY of the radiation over an area of land is greatest when that area is receiving the radiation is tilted toward it and least when it is tilted away from it. (Summer and Winter Solstices) Think of it like this...

You have a cylinder filled with light pointing toward the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth The amount of light strikes a very small area when that area is tilted toward the source. All of the intensity of that light is restricted to that small area and the area is very bright.. When you tilt the same place away from the source (the light) the area illuminated becomes greater with the effect that the brightness of the light becomes lesser over the larger area now illuminated. Now actually the intensity of the light has not changed at all. It is just being distributed over a larger area of land.

So let's do a real experiment to demonstrate... Take a flashlight and tape a cylinder of dark paper around the front of it.

In a darkened room with a globe... shine the light at the a part of the globe tilted toward the light. See how brightly that area is lit up? Draw a circle around that area. Now slowly tilt the globe away from the light source. As you see the area of illumination grow beyond the bounds of your circle that you drew you will also see that the light within the area in the circle that you drew is becoming dimmer.

Well the Sun not only emits radiation in the light, but it also emits infrared radiation...which is heat. That radiation follows the same rules. The heat becomes less intense over the same area as the globe is tilted away because it is being distributed over a larger area of land..

Hope this helps. Do the experiment.

Now, obviously as the Northern Hemisphere is being tilted away from the Sun, and thus becoming cooler, the Southern Hemisphere is being tilted toward the Sun and thus becoming warmer, due to the orbital motion of the Earth about our Sun.

Answer 3

Imagine you had a globe (the Earth) in a dark room with a lamp on the desk. As you tilt the 'top (north pole) towards the lamp while the globe was turned, you'd see that more than half of rthe area above the equator was 'lighted'. And, when that happens, the average temperature goes up. Likewise, it you tip the top 'away' from the lamp, less than half of the top of the globe is lighted and the temperature goes down. And note that, when it's 'summer' north of the equator, it's 'winter' in the sounth and vice versa.

HTH ☺

Doug

Answer 4

the earth is tilted, as you know. As the earth spins and moves around the sun around the course of the year, it becomes closer and farther from the sun causing more light and more heat to reach the earth.

Answer 5

The fact that Earth moves on it's orbit.

Answer 6

I can not make drawings here. So please see http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/seasons.htm and http://filer.case.edu/~sjr16/earth.html. In the second site you will see picture of earth but move down to get pictorial explanation of seasons. Good luck.

Answer 7

the orbit of the earth