The Summer Season officially began at 4:07 am MDT Thursday June 21st.
Up to this point, June of 2018 in Jackson Hole has had its ups and downs. The first week or two of the month it was warm and dry, reaching our first 80-degree day on June 9th. Then, the last several days, going back to the start of the Father’s Day Weekend, we got a deluge of rain that put down 1.61 inches of rain in the Town of Jackson is less than 4 days. Sunday & Sunday night, June 17th, accounted for 1.05 inches of that total. On Monday, June 18th, our high temperature was only 56-degrees.
Now that summer has “officially” arrived, hopefully we can get on with some more summer-like weather conditions. Normal High temperatures would be in the mid 70’s in Jackson this last week or so of June. We may get back to that again next week, but this weekend looks like it will be a little cooler than that, as a couple of upper level low-pressure Trofs roll across the Pacific Northwest & Northern Rockies. Those disturbances will cause some showers, but not the deluges like we saw this past weekend.
Some Solstice Facts
The time of the Summer Solstice (4:07 am MDT Thursday June 21st) is precisely when the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Cancer, at 23.5 degrees North latitude.
The Solstice also marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Actually, sunrise/sunset times do not change much around the Solstice, as the last few days, since June 19th, have all had about the same length of daylight. The days don’t really start getting shorter for another week or two, by a minute or two.
We will have almost 16 hours of daylight in Jackson the rest of June — not including twilight — compared to less than 9 hours around the Winter Solstice in December.
The first graphic below shows the tilt of the earth and its orientation to the sun’s ray on June 21st.
This second graphic shows the change in the tilt of the earth and its orientation to the sun. This is what’s responsible for the seasonal changes we see.
Around the Summer Solstice the sun will also appear as high in the sky as it gets around here, about 70 degrees above the horizon at noontime. It will also be rise a little more north of due east and setting a little more north of dues west, due to the shape and curvature of the earth.
That’s your solstice science lesson for today. Happy Summer!
Posted June 21, 2018 by meteorologist Jim Woodmencey