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Does windy weather cool down the temperature during a sunny day?

In a weather report, if I want to know how cold it will be at 10pm a certain night, should I look at the next day's low temperature?

  • For example, if I see Tuesday has a low of 45 degrees and Wednesday has a low of 50 degrees, and I am wondering how cool it will be Tuesday night around 10pm, should I look at Wednesday's low or Tuesday's low?

  • Answer:

    Though the next day's low is a more relevant value, the answer is really neither. Assuming that the meaning of "low" is clear (lowest temperature recorded in the 24 hour period starting 12am ending 11:59pm), your question seems to be asking whether the 10pm temperature is closer on average to the low of the current day or the low of the next day.  Truth is it's not too close to either.  It is about halfway between the current day's "high" and the next day's "low". Here's some airport data: Most everywhere on earth (assuming you are not within the antarctic or arctic circles) the sun rises around 5 or 6 am, solar radiation intensity peaks around 12pm, and then the sun sets around 6 or 7pm.  Typically, the peak temperature lags peak solar power by several hours, so the "high" actually occurs around 3 or 4 pm on average.  The mechanism is explained roughly by this graphic I found: [1] The earth gains energy when it absorbs photons from the sun.  The earth loses energy when it emits photons back into space. Terrestrial temperature goes up if the earth is absorbing more than it is emitting, and goes down when it emits more than it absorbs.  When the two are equal, the change in temperature is zero and you are at a local min/max.  As long as the sun is up it is pouring more energy into the earth and the earth's temperature will increase until it reaches this equilibrium point.  If the sun is down energy is only lost and the temperature decreases monotonically.  Air temperature must be adjusted somewhat as it is heated both by the radiation incoming and the radiation outgoing, but it roughly follows the curve of the earth. What this means is while one might expect the temperatures to max out at noon and bottom out at midnight, the reality is quite different.  The "low" happens just after sunrise and the "high" happens in late afternoon.  10pm is almost exactly halfway between, so splitting the difference is probably your best bet. [1]http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter3/daily_trend2.html

Lulu Liu at Quora Visit the source

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It really depends. You can go to http://www.weatherspark.com to get an estimated value for the next day's low temperature. That being said, I've closely tracked the high and low values for a particular city (Denver) for half a decade by now, and I've definitely noticed that there is a lot of variability. There are times when the temperature at 10 PM is very close to the overnight low (especially during nights when the summer high is over 100 degrees - such as the heat wave of 2005). There are other times when the temperature at 10 PM is closer to the midpoint between the high and the next day's low.

Alex K. Chen

The "low" for a forecast day is the anticipated lowest temperature that will be observed during the forecast day.  Part of the problem here is that different forecasters use different observation and forecast days; some use midnight to midnight, others use sunrise to sunrise, sunset to sunset, other fixed times of day, or a sliding window of 24 hours (or possibly 18 or 12 hours) from the time of forecast.  In practice, most short term forecasts include forecast grids at much smaller than full-day resolutions.  If you want to know what the estimated temperature will be at 10pm on Tuesday, look at the forecast grid for Tuesday and drill down to 10pm.  You might have to settle for 9pm or 11pm; not all grids are divided in hour segments. If you can't get a intraday forecast for some reason, then you can reasonably expect the evening temperature to be somewhere between the daytime high (which normally occurs sometime in the afternoon) and the daytime low (which normally occurs sometime around dawn), but beyond that would require looking at additional information (e.g. what season it is, is it storming, is a front passing, etc.).

Kelly Martin

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