How much warmer is the day compared to the night? Or, in other words, how large is the diurnal air temperature range (DTR)? This might seem like a simple question, but the DTR actually varies in surprisingly complex ways across regions and periods. What shapes these variations? What happens to DTR on cloudy days and under clear skies? How does it respond to how wet or dry the land is? And what happens to DTR as the planet warms? We answer these questions in our new study led by Sarosh, published in Geophysical Research Letters. Our goal was to understand the physics behind the DTR using an approach that links the short and long-term variations in DTR to things we can observe and measure, like clouds, sunlight, and surface dryness.