Weather

Spring is here at last! The beginning of this week will be dry with more above-average temperatures.

By Dave Epstein, The Boston Globe

March 21, 2022

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Today is the first full day of spring which technically arrived yesterday morning at 11:33.

I like to think of this as the third in the series of ways to measure spring. We started with solar spring on February 5 and that marked the end of the darkest quarter of the year. This was followed three weeks later by meteorological spring which is the three-month transition between the three coldest and three warmest months of the year. Each of these markers has significance. And while some of you may feel like March 20 doesn’t yet mean beach weather, the start of the season has been underway for weeks.

The vernal equinox marks the point at which the sun is directly over the equator at noon. The first day of spring is not a day in which we have equal day and night. That occurred back on March 17 and it’s called The equilix. From now until mid-September daylight will outpace the night. Of course, the greatest amount of daylight occurs on the first day of summer but even that day doesn’t mark the earliest sunrise or the latest sunset. Those respectively occur before and after the summer solstice.

The beginning of this week is looking dry with more above-average temperatures. By the end of the week, things turn a little more stormy, but the timing and details of this are yet to be be determined.

While obviously, I don’t know the exact weather over the next three months, we do know that between now and the first day of summer we will gain another 3 hours and 8 minutes of light and average temperatures will jump from the mid-40s to near80 degrees. It is also likely we have at least one day where temperatures approach 90.

Over the past several decades, this period between astronomical spring and the summer solstice has gotten warmer. The bulk of this warming of course is due to man-made climate change and means that our air conditioners are likely to be turned on earlier in the coming years.