What is in a season?
Who knew that seasons could be so interesting.

As the earth spins around the sun. It is also tilted as it travels, which means parts of the earth have times of being further away from the sun. This creates colder and darker months, along with warmer and lighter months throughout the year.

I never gave much thought about the four seasons that occur here in the UK. They just happened and I assumed everyone on the planet had the same, but perhaps at different times of the year. How wrong was I !

We actually have three different ways seasons are recorded in the UK. Meteorological, astronomical and phenological.

The meteorological seasons have the simplified start/end dates of:
Spring: March to May
Summer: June to August
Autumn: September to November
Winter: December to February

The astronomical seasons have a more complex specific date start/end dates of:
Spring: mid March to mid June
Summer: mid June to mid September
Autumn: mid September to mid december
Winter: mid December to mid March

The actual dates are not the same each year as the calendar humans use causes fractions of days to occur throughout the year, which is also why February has an extra day every four years.

There is also the phenological seasons which have 10 seasons a year!

They are:
Early spring, mid spring, late spring, early summer, mid summer, late summer, early autumn, mid autumn, late autumn and winter.

I then looked round the rest of the world to see what occurred there.

I discovered that the nearer to the equator you are, the more equal the days stayed the same. So the environment stayed very balanced throughout the year.
Although, they do have seasons, mostly just two. Wet and dry.

As you move away from the equator the number of seasons increase.
Three seasons are generally summer, monsoon and winter.
Or summer, monsoon and wet.

Even countries that you would expect to have four seasons use different ways of recording seasons, which seem to be a mix of astronomical and phonological. Which can give those countries 5, 6 or even 8 seasons.

This can been seen with subtle variations due to other environmental differences, such as altitude and terrain.

This is repeated throughout the word, ending at the north and south poles that have two seasons, summer and winter. They only get 6 months of light each year in their summer season.