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Generally speaking I suppose temperature rises as long as the sun is up and then it continues to fall until sunrise the next day. I have once noticed temperature rise temporarily during night (In my institute where I study, a temperature board out side Department of Hydrology displays the temperature). Is there an error in the data or is it possible for temperature to rise during the night? Is it possible naturally?

I am not sure if this question belongs here in the physics section so sorry if I am transgressing.

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  • $\begingroup$ Weather systems come and go... $\endgroup$ – Jon Custer Jan 21 '16 at 19:57
  • $\begingroup$ The ultimate extension to your answer: heat bursts $\endgroup$ – JeopardyTempest Apr 5 '17 at 5:43
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The ambient temperature comes out of many different factors, and daytime normally is warmer due to sunlight, but the largest single factor is simply how warm the air is... And that air can blow in from other places. The easiest time to notice this is when a front blows through your area in the middle of the day: the sunlight stays the same, but the air temperature changes rapidly.

Sunlight heating the earth is a simple and fundamental phenomenon which is generally responsible for weather, but the weather itself is more complicated than a linear dependence on sunlight, and the intricacies of meteorology do tend out of topic for this site.

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Aside from the trivial possibility that a warm front passes through during the night, a frequent occurrence in winter (where I live) would be that you have a cold, sunny day, but that cloud cover begins to increase some time after the Sun has set.

The cloud cover acts as a blanket, preventing infrared radiation from the ground escaping into space. This has the effect of warming the air. It is thus possible for the temperature to decrease as the Sun goes down and even well into the night (because outer space is cold), but as soon as cloud cover comes over then the temperature can increase significantly because the ground is a large reservoir of heat.

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It depends, when the sun is up, the sun warms up the roads and ground, and when the sun goes down, the heat rapidly comes off. What really causes warm weather at night is either an on-coming warm front but will reduce sunny days because the warm air at night turns to condensation which holds the warm air at ground level

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