How many days until winter?

Astronomical winter begins at the December solstice, around 21 December, the shortest day of the northern year. In the Emirates that means roughly ten and a half hours of daylight, a sunrise just before seven and a sunset a little before six — a genuine contrast with midsummer, but nothing like the darkness of a European December.

Winter here is the season everything else is arranged around. From late November to March the daytime temperature settles somewhere in the twenties, the humidity drops away, and the outdoor half of the country reopens: the desert camping season, the running and cycling calendar, the outdoor festivals and night markets, the terraces that have been closed since April. It is also the tourist peak, which is why hotel occupancy, airport traffic and road congestion all rise together through these months.

Nights can be genuinely cool inland, with the desert dropping into single figures on the coldest ones, and the mountains around the east coast lower still. Rain, when it comes at all, comes now — a handful of days a year, enough to flood underpasses that were built for a drier assumption.

The countdown targets the solstice and rolls forward to the following year once it has passed.