Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Tides
the Moon’s phase allows them to experience such electrical
field changes.
We always talk about the Sun’s heat, but the Moon
has a heating effect on us too. In 1995 Robert Balling (of
the team John Shaffer, Randall Cerveny and Robert Balling,
of Arizona State University) found an influence of the
Moon’s phase on daily global temperatures. In the course
of a lunar cycle, it happens that the global temperatures in
the lower troposphere (the lowest 6 kilometers of the atmosphere)
are warmest about 5 to 8 days before the Full
Moon and coolest during the New Moon, after which the
temperatures cooled.
During a period of nearly 5,934 days (more than 200
synodic cycles) between 1979 and the early months of
1995, the phase of the Moon accounted for a global variation
in temperature of about 0.02 to 0.03 degrees Celsius.
Maybe not enough to fear getting moonburnt, but it is significant
enough to alter weather.
The same team found that the Moon also heats the
Earth’s poles. Using 17 years of satellite temperature data,
they found that the poles show a temperature range of 0.55
degrees C during a lunar month. This range of temperature
is 25 times greater than for global temperatures as a whole.
It shows that there is a strong pole-ward transfer of heat
near the Full Moon but the transfer weakens near the New
Moon.
A study by Kirby Hanson and his colleagues at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed
a lunar effect on the timing of the maximum spring rainfall
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