system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is it on hot summer nights the temperature only cools down briefly at the break of Dawn? It seems counterintuitive. Why would it get cooler just as the sun is rising?
gpt
During the day, sunlight warms the surface of the Earth (and for this we'll kind of lump the actual surface of the Earth and the lower portion of the atmosphere in direct contact with the surface of the Earth). At night, this heat is radiated back into the higher atmosphere and space, and so the portion of the surface of the Earth experiencing night cools (the surface is also radiating heat during the day, it's just that at night there is effectively no source of heat to counteract the loss of heat to the atmosphere and space). At any given spot, the surface of the Earth has lost the most heat from the previous day shortly after the sunrises because incoming solar radiation is not really heating the surface of the Earth effectively until the sun is above the horizon (i.e. until light is shining directly on the Earth). A very simple analogy would be a pot of water on the stove that you heated in cycles, e.g., you turned on the burner for 30 minutes, turned off the burner for 30 minutes, turned on the burner for 30 minutes, etc. In this scenario, when would the water be it's coolest? Basically at the end of the 30 minute "burner off" periods and shortly into the next "burner on" period because it takes time for the water and pot to radiate the heat accumulated during the "burner on" period and a little bit of time for the water and pot to start warming up with the burner back on.