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Is the weather better at night?

Cyclecamp Blogpost 003

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It’s not often you find a question that hasn’t been asked before on Google but we dug deeper and, sure enough, we weren’t the only ones who had pondered it: is the weather better at night?

Have you ever sat in your tent as the night draws in, the sky clears, the temperature drops rapidly and the stars begin to twinkle? On a warm summer evening that’s great. But if the day has been cloudy and cool, a cold night isn’t necessarily what you want.

As the condensation begins to form on the walls of your tent and you snuggle deeper into your sleeping bag, you look forward to the bright morning and a blue sky. Which is what you get. But by the time you’ve cooked up some breakfast and run your feet through the dewy grass, the wind is up, the clouds are scudding across the sky and you feel the chill. Why is this? Why can’t you seem to keep that blue sky?

In fact, why couldn’t you have a clear blue sky during the day and a cloudy sky at night to keep the heat in? Well, it doesn’t always happen like this but in the UK at least, our proximity to the sea means that, since the land cools faster at night than the sea, the wind drops q uite quickly. In the daytime, the air over the land warms faster than the air over the sea: the wind from the sea rushes in to fill the void, bringing plenty of cloud with it.

So there we have it, the weather can be better at night. Cycle campers notice these things because they sleep in a tent and are outside in the daytime. And it’s observations like these that go into the memory store to be reflected upon on a winter’s evening - that's cycle camping!

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