Being raised in Brazil, on a urban environment there are basically two seasons: Summer and Winter, the rest is just transition between them.
Now, having just moved to the USA I am constantly incredibly confused by season references. Not only because the seasons are inverted, but because we do not use season references for anything in Brazil. We say the months name or things like "end/middle/start of the year" or "first/second semester"
So when I see that a movie will come to the theaters "next fall" I have no idea when it is.
But now we have the cricket world cup in the middle of footy season and soccer football in the middle of cricket season. I blame climate Change /s.
More seriously, the CSIRO has attempted to define Australia's seasons better (in line with plants) with the addition of Sprinter on Sprummer: http://www.publish.csiro.au/book/7221 . The BOM has a page on various indigenous seasons too: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/index.shtml . I'm enjoying an unseasonably warm Chunnup day today.
This is Australia we're talking about. Seven Mile Beach, Great Barrier Reef, Great Sandy Desert, Granite Island... Calling things exactly what they are seems like a tradition.
On the Central Coast of NSW (an hour or so north of Sydney) there is a salt water lake, and a town has grown near the lake's entrance to the sea. It's called The Entrance. Parts of the lake are shallow and muddy, and a long jetty (pier) has been built. That town is Long Jetty. Shelly Beach is close by too.
> Being raised in Brazil, on a urban environment there are basically two seasons: Summer and Winter, the rest is just transition between them.
Agreed. This has been bugging me for a while.
Over here in Poland, between the yearly variations in temperatures and the differences between urban and rural areas, I don't see how the concept of "Spring" and "Fall" make any kind of sense. Not when in a small city where I live "Spring" starts up to month later than in a large city 70km to the north.
Why not switch to two seasons, Summer and Winter, and use equinoxes as split points? The seasons would at least have a nice definition then: summer = days are longer than nights; winter = nights are longer than days.
EDIT: Speaking of the article, I can't imagine how this super fine-grained classification could work. The usual four seasons have already so much variation in when they start vs. when phenomena associated with them actually happen; I can't imagine e.g. "Geese fly north, the first rainbows of the year appear. - Apr 4" working as anything but "April 4 ± 1 month", which kind of defeats the purpose of this classification.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of the classification.
It's not to determine the date from the season or the season from the date.
It's to be able to say "Sparrows were late this year - the last three times that happened there was an insect problem, let's keep an eye out for that."
I might have. But wrt. your example, my point is that "sparrows were late / early this year" is just something that's being said every year. Nature doesn't work off a clock; there's plenty of noise and oscillations in these phenomena. I'm not convinced such observations are useful.
It’s a super frustrating thing about the US. They’ll say ‘this summer’, but being in the Southern Hemisphere it’s winter. Month names are so much easier.
Oddly enough I'm used to the summer/winter mixup but spring and "fall" still trip me up. Which is weird because you'd think I could just map "fall" to "spring" and be done with it.
FYI чэрвень comes from the Slavic name of Polish cochineal, an insect harvested in June and used to produce red dye until Mexican cochineal pushed it out of the market.
I moved from the southeast US to the Bay Area, and the difference in seasons is striking. It went from a clearly defined spring, summer, fall, and winter to what appears to be "brown/dry" season and "green/wet" season. I certainly don't miss winter or the hottest parts of summer, but I do miss spring and fall (particularly autumn colors). The almost nonstop sunshine is a nice replacement though.
I wonder what other parts of the world have "weird" seasons?
Where I live (Townsville, Australia) the only changes are that it gets hotter the closer you are to Summer and cooler the closer you are to Winter. The rainfall (minimal) is pretty similar all year round.
UK is much nearer the picture described in the article's small seasons. I'm sure a century back in many families could come up with the regional variations on this theme. They would be highly localised too, as despite being a small island we pack a ridiculous amount of weather into our "mild" climate. :)
Winter breaks into the damp start, the still but gloomy mid winter, and the sharp coldness[1] of late winter. All the others break down similarly.
[1] UK doesn't really have winters like I remember from youth and twenties any more.
Sydney, Australia is pretty much the same - 2 seasons, most trees are green all year, and things that you’d normally associate with Autumn tend to happen at the start of Winter.
Where in the southeast? I grew up around Knoxville, which had reasonably well defined seasons. Then I moved to Atlanta, which basically has “summer” and “not summer”.
I live in Atlanta (formerly: Philadelphia, Boston, Bay Area). I would say that Atlanta "winter" is cold enough to be a season - although it's more defined by the threat of possible snow than by actual snow.
Looks like the Chinese names are identical to the Japanese ones. (Or really, the other way around.)
Chinese 节气 are certainly not defined or tracked by natural phenomena such as fish becoming visible under the ice or plants blooming, though. As Wikipedia notes, they are defined astronomically and are used to calculate when an extra month needs to be inserted into the calendar.
(Each 节气 is assigned a polarity, yin or yang. A month is supposed to include one yin point and one yang point. Since lunar months are too short, eventually there will be a month with only one point instead of the correct two; that month is immediately repeated. I think this system is very cool because just a little thought will show that it is guaranteed to stay within one month of the "true" position of the earth wrt the sun, using just the dead simple method of "Oh, were we too slow this month? We'll put in some overtime.")
This is fascinating. I love the names of these seasons, and this guide does a great job offering a pithy and easily grokable description.
By the same token, I am curious how else we can come to understand seasons and yearly cycles. The climate stability that led to this sequence of small seasons and their associations with agriculture has begun to vanish. With the worsening climate emergency, where there is no "new normal," what yearly cycles can we still hold onto?
It's unfortunate that your description already feels like it has more of an impact on my life than most details in the sekki descriptions, with or without climate change. Just reading the sekki descriptions initially made me kinda sad because I realized how far removed I am from all that. That was at least different as a kid who played outside a lot in a small village.
One of the weirdest things about existence, besides that we're all made of meat or that the entire universe will one day crumble into cold nothingness forever, is that we can only be one person.
You can be the one who stayed in the village or the one who left the village for the big city, but you can't be both. You can be one who left the village but came back, or the one who goes back and forth between the city and the village, but those are different, a third and forth person, and whichever one you pick, you still only get to be one.
The climate over time has not been stable and has affected history. The decline of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Justinian May have been due to a colder climate. (There is evidence for a large volcanic eruption too) Also some fairly bad climatic conditions didn’t help the lead up to the French Revolution.
Some solar terms are based on astronomical observations (vernal & autumn equinox, summer & winter solstice) and while they no longer line up with seasonal changes you can definitely rely on them.
A nice and simple website. I like the responsive design here. Text size scales with window size, and the table loses its first column on smaller screens.
I like it, thanks for making this and bringing my attention to this concept. The descriptions remind me of Japanese Zen poems ("Rice has ripened, the heat of summer, forgotten.")
Reading it, I wondered how much the 'little seasons' are identical between various regions on the northern hemisphere?
I subscribed to the iCal calendar, and the descriptions have HTML tags in them. Any chance of avoiding this?
There is an extremely nice app (IOS only, I am afraid: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/72-seasons/id1059622777 ) called "72 Seasons" which collects charming pictures, poems and interesting factoids for each of the 72 seasons.
Being raised in Brazil, on a urban environment there are basically two seasons: Summer and Winter, the rest is just transition between them.
Now, having just moved to the USA I am constantly incredibly confused by season references. Not only because the seasons are inverted, but because we do not use season references for anything in Brazil. We say the months name or things like "end/middle/start of the year" or "first/second semester"
So when I see that a movie will come to the theaters "next fall" I have no idea when it is.