Which Hemisphere has hotter Summers, Why | English | Earth Science, Geography, Astronomy
Channel: Arvind Gupta
Date: 2015-06-22

We saw that while people in Northern Hemisphere enjoy summer in July when the sun is directly overhead at Tropic of Cancer, people in Southern hemisphere enjoy summer in December when the sun is directly Overhead at Tropic of Capricorn. So which region has hotter summer? The Northern Hemisphere in July or Southern Hemisphere in December. Ideally both places should be equally hot. But it turns out that Northern Summers are hotter than Southern Summers. Let’s dig deeper into this phenomena. Northern hemisphere has summers when earth’s axis is tilted towards the sun and so it gets direct sunlight. Additionally summers in Northern hemisphere happen when the sun is farthest from earth. So this extra Distance means that we would get 7% less energy in summers than summers in southern Hemisphere in December. This should mean that summers in Southern hemisphere should be hotter. However this is not the case.

 Let's see why. This has to do with the amount of land to water ratio in the two hemispheres. In the Northern there is lot more Land while the southern has lot more water/salt water in the ocean. Land absorbs heat very fast and gets heated up much faster as compared to water. So when it is summer in Northern hemisphere larger amount of land get heated up faster. In the summers in Southern Hemisphere the larger amount of oceans take much longer to Heat up and so the overall summer temperatures are not that high. Water also loses heat slowly, so the large water bodies in the southern hemisphere which got heated up slowly in the summers lose heat slowly during winters. This leads to milder winters and summers. And all this is due to much larger percentage of water in southern hemisphere. So enjoy the slightly hotter summers of Northern Hemisphere in July. This work was supported by IUCAA and Tata Trust. TATA Trust: Education is one of the key focus areas for Tata Trusts, aiming towards enabling access of quality education to the underprivileged population in India. To facilitate quality in teaching and learning of Science education through workshops, capacity building and resource creation, Tata Trusts have been supporting Muktangan Vigyan Shodhika (MVS), IUCAA's Children’s Science Centre, since inception. To know more about other initiatives of Tata Trusts, please visit www.tatatrusts.org