Deeply baptized frosts: myth or reality?

Perhaps among contemporaries it is impossible to find a person who would never have heard of baptismal frosts. According to the calendar, they coincide with January 19 - Orthodox holiday of Epiphany, which by value is equal to Easter and is considered one of the most important and the most ancient.

Traditions and signs

And believers, despite a sharp and considerable cooling, accompany the festivities with mass bathing in the sanctified Jordan-ice-holes. This atmospheric phenomenon gave rise to many people's perceptions. According to the ancestors' observations, the thaw, fog and hoarfrost at Baptism were treated as favorable signs of the harvest of bread, peas, and when it snowed in the Kreshchenskie frosts in the winter, it was believed that it also bastards buckwheat. Also believed that if the frosts on Epiphany are much stronger than Christmas and last all week, then afterwards they will necessarily be replaced by the thaw weeks, but then again there will be frosts, even harsher, but the last one will be in the current winter.

Causes and consequences

From the scientific point of view, the term "Epiphany frosts" is questioned, since, according to many years of observations by meteorologists, cooling does not always fall on January 19. Sometimes frosty weather is established much earlier than the indicated date, and sometimes much later. These terms have a significant "backlash" of up to two weeks. But still, most people believe that this cold snap is connected with Baptism. This is definitely a psychological factor. Several cases were recorded when a thaw began on the appointed date, and the temperature decrease occurred much later. But people still asserted that in the yard they were baptized with Epiphany frosts. The population is easier to write off everything to mysticism, because the people in the world long to see the inexplicable and mysterious where it is often not. This weather phenomenon is a snap to the religious view, which was long ago firmly established.

Hydrometeorologists are authorized to declare

Scientists who possess reliable information on the average annual temperature statistics, give a completely scientific explanation of this atmospheric phenomenon. The fact is that for the greater part of Eurasia the weather in the second half of January is determined by the Asian anticyclone, which prevails for a period of two weeks and leads to a sharp drop in temperature. To say it unequivocally, when the cold winters in winter with full force, it is impossible, from the scientific point of view there is no decrease in temperature, which falls exactly on January 19. And if the weather is tightening a little earlier, beginning on January 13, then people say that this year the Epiphany frosts are early, and if after 25 they say that this year they are late. Science does not support such a popular idea, because in connection with the variability of the motion of air mass flows in the Earth's atmosphere, which generates turbulence, the weather is positioned as a random process. Therefore, any forecast is possible only with a small degree of probability. Neither the temperature drop nor the duration of the frosty period can be the same in different years. The spread is more than a week.

What frost after Epiphany?

So, these weather whims are purely psychological and artificially created people's binding to an outstanding religious date, since they are far from the only ones. In fact, besides mentioned above, there are Christmas, and Timofeevsky, and Nikopol, and Sretensky frosts. And religious holidays and weather phenomena may not coincide also because between the famous winter festivities, such as Christmas, Epiphany, Timothy, about the same time period of 2 weeks. And cyclones and anticyclones are turbulent for only a week, because it is these atmospheric phenomena, and not the date in the calendar, that denote the time of temperature decrease. Here they are - the Epiphany frosts!