I found this leaf underneath a maple on the Moultonborough Neck Road yesterday. It wasn't the only one. The second picture is of a sunset I photographed from the bleachers at Fenway Park on July 9. I'll talk about that in a minute.
Chipj29, you may be right about the unseasonably warm autumn. We have an El Nino going in the Pacific right now. That often spells cool wet summers and warm dry winters for us. It was an early El Nino though, which means it may be early to end. We may remember that winter of 2006-07 got off to a chilly, early start. Then it became warm and rainy for a while, right into January. Then, the El Nino broke down and suddenly we went into the icebox for the rest of the season - we had a mild Christmas and a white Easter.
We could very well have a mild autumn until that El Nino breaks down. Then watch out.
This summer's winter weather pattern is likely rooted in a combination of things:
1. Reduced solar output. The sun goes through an 11.1 year cycle with max and min output, discovered by Galileo. It is very rare that the sun gets stuck in between cycles, but that is what has happened. It reached minimum a couple years ago and didn't bounce back as usual. BBC recently reported that the Ulysses space probe has been reporting the sun's output is reduced on every parameter that the probe is capable of measuring. Pretty simple - when the fire dies down, the people next to it start shivering and saying, "Someone throw another log on there..." It recently showed signs of getting the next cycle going again. However, on earth there is usually a lag between max solar energy and max temp in the weather. Daily, the sun peaks at noon, but the high for the day doesn't happen until 2 or 3 pm. Seasonally, the sun peaks in June, but the peak of summer isn't until mid-July. The sun is at its lowest point in the sky in December, but we don't reach the coldest part of winter until 4-6 weeks later.
2. Pacific Ocean in cold phase. The oceans each have a warm and cold phase. The Pacific just kicked into its cold phase (good for many years to come) in 2007.
3. A handful of volcanoes have managed to blast some heat-reflecting particles into the upper atmosphere. Volcanic cooling is a normal occurence on Earth, and we haven't seen much of it in our lifetimes. Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillippines blew up in the early 90s and noticably chilled off the earth for 2-4 years. That's about all we've seen recently. There have been blasts, but none reaching the stratosphere with enough stuff to block out solar heat. In the last year or so, we've had a few small blasts like that. None was really newsworthy, but collectively they've put enough stuff in the stratosphere to create some really nice sunsets around the northern hemisphere. SpaceWeather.com wrote about that recently. A few days later, I was at Fenway Park, watching my first sunset in weeks (it's been THAT cloudy around here this summer, if you haven't been here to see it.) The sunset I saw was just like the one shown on SpaceWeather, which was just like the "Pinatubo Sunsets" I remembered from the early 90s.
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