How the Earth’s tilt creates short, cold January days

Subject : Geography

How does the Earth’s orbit influence our daylight and temperatures?

During the 24 hours that it takes for the Earth to rotate once around its axis, every point on its surface faces toward the Sun for part of the time and away from it for part of the time.
This is what causes daily changes in sunlight and temperature.
There are two other important factors:

As a result, light falls directly on its equator but strikes the North and South poles at angles.

Why does it often get colder in January even though we’re gaining daylight?

Earth absorbs sunlight and then radiates it back into the atmosphere.
The radiation back from earth heats the atmosphere.
So, as long as the part of earth receives less sunlight than the heat it emits, the area will keep getting colder.
This is especially true over land, which loses heat much more easily than water.
As the Earth rotates, air circulates around it in the atmosphere.
During winter the air comes from the colder regions, which further drops the temperature.

How quickly do we lose daylight before the solstice and gain it back afterward?

This depends strongly on our location.
The closer we are to one of the poles, the faster the rate of change in daylight is.
Even for a particular location, the change is not constant through the year.
The rate of change in daylight is slowest at the solstices — December in winter, June in summer — and fastest at the equinoxes, in mid-March and mid-September.
This change occurs as the area on Earth receiving direct sunlight swings from 23.5 N latitude to 23.5 S latitude.

What’s happening in the southern hemisphere right now?

The summer is peaking there, with the largest amount of sunlight.
But due to less land and more water in the southern hemisphere, they have fewer extreme climatic events (both in numbers and intensity) than that of the northern hemisphere.