Seasonal lag

Extremes range from as little as 15–20 days for polar regions in summer, as well as continental interiors, for example Fairbanks, Alaska, where annual average warmest temperatures occur in early July, and August is notably cooler than June, to 2–3 months in oceanic locales, whether in low latitudes, as in Miami, Florida or higher latitudes as in the Kuril Islands (where at Simushir annual average temperatures peak in late August), and at Cape Sable Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, where (by a slight margin) September is actually the year's warmest month on average.

San Francisco, for example, has an exceptionally long seasonal lag in the summer, with average daily temperatures peaking in September, and October as its second-warmest month, but very little seasonal lag in the winter, with the lowest temperatures in December and January, around and soon after the winter solstice.

Many areas along North America's west coast have very small winter lag and are characterized by a much more gradual spring warming and relatively more rapid autumn cooling.

In eastern Canada the seasonal lag is consistent both in summer and winter, resulting in February and August being the coldest and warmest months, respectively.

In Western Europe the lag is lower in spite of the Atlantic coastline, usually around a month, which is also consistent with many inland areas in the North American Midwest.

[2] For the case of Venus no seasonal lag would be detected, because the planet undergoes no seasons due to very efficient heat transport in its massive atmosphere (which would obliterate the season-causing effect of axial tilt, but its axial tilt is very small anyway) and very low orbital eccentricity (almost no changes to its distance from the Sun).

The amount of Sun energy reaching a location on Earth (" insolation ", shown in blue) varies through the seasons . As it takes time for the seas and lands to heat or cool, the surface temperatures will lag the primary cycle by roughly a month, although this will vary from location to location, and the lag is not necessarily symmetric between summer and winter. The diagram uses neopagan labeling ; Litha is the summer solstice, Yule is the winter solstice, Ostara is the vernal equinox, and Mabon is the autumnal equinox.