Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of Beyond The Forecast!
In my opinion, one of the best parts about summer is the longer days and later sunsets. Although summer just got started last week, we’ll actually start to see sunsets start to trend EARLIER later this week.
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That’s right, the sunset each evening through Thursday will be at 8:44 p.m., then it will start getting earlier for about six months.
Don’t get too bummed out though, it will be a slow and steady progress. We’ll only lose 26 minutes of light in the evenings in the next six weeks.
The sun will set for the first time before 8 p.m. on August 24. It won’t set after 8 p.m. again until April 21, 2022.
The midway point of this process happens in September with the autumnal equinox. That’s when we’ll have nearly equal daytime and nighttime.
Fall officially begins on September 22 at 9:04 p.m. The sun will set at 7:16 p.m. on that day.
The end of Daylight Saving Time in early November will cause us to lose a full hour of daylight in the evenings.
The sunset goes from 6:16 p.m. on November 6 to 5:15 p.m. on November 7.
Finally, we’ll reach our shortest day of the year in late December with the winter solstice, although technically, the earlier sunset of the year happens from December 5-7 (5:01 p.m.).
The solstice will occur on December 21 at 4:48 p.m. Sunset will be at 5:05 p.m. that evening.
The reason for the variations of day length and sunset time? The tilt of the earth. If Earth weren’t tilted, we would have 12 hour days and steady sunsets all year round.
Switching gears to your forecast, it was a hot and humid start to the week and our heatwave is expected to continue for a few more days. Find out when storm chances increase and when we cool down some in our daily forecast article from Chris Michaels.
You can always get specific forecast details for your zone, whether it’s the Roanoke Valley, Lynchburg area, the New River Valley or elsewhere around Southwest and Central Virginia, anytime at WSLS.com/weather. Know your zone!
In case you missed it, we’re posting great weather and science content on WSLS.com. Here are a few links from the past week to check out:
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-- Justin McKee