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Photo by Curtis Galbraith.
By Curtis Galbraith
Weather

December 21 marks the official start of winter

Dec 21, 2023 | 6:00 AM

December 21 is the first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Winter Solstice, the moment when the tilt in the Earth’s axis puts the Northern Hemisphere farthest from the sun, occurs at 8:37 p.m. Alberta time.

Winter arrives after an El Nino fall that was warmer and drier than normal.

Jack Burnett with the Old Farmer’s Almanac says El Nino starts when warm water in the Pacific Ocean off Central and South America impacts the jet stream.

“When there aren’t great extremes, those jet streams stay straight. They may wobble a little.”

“If you start pushing warmer water up toward the cold water of the Arctic then, all of a sudden, it’s like you have a 100-foot rope and you tied it to a tree. It’s pretty much straight (but) if you oscillate the rope, you start flipping it, it’s going to go up and down.”

Burnett says the name El Nino dates back to the colonization of South America. Indigenous people who were fishers and knew the warm water returned every few years around this time, had been converted to Christianity.

“In the meantime, the missionaries are teaching them that this is when the Christ child was born. El Nino, as you may realize, means The Baby.”

“Because the warm waters always seemed to arrive at the same time that the missionaries were telling them that the Christ child was born, they started calling the warm waters The Baby or The Little One.”

Burnett says even with El Nino, the Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a cold, snowy winter for Alberta this year, much like typical winters in years past.

More on that can be found here.

by Curtis Galbraith