October Flakes

Even though it won't stick, we might be seeing our first flakes of the season this morning! It's way ahead of schedule, especially considering how warm we've been leading up to this current cold shot, but for snow lovers like me... we'll take it!

Second Big Front Brings FALL

It was about 8 days after our first big weather-changing front, we got a second one:

This one wasn't quite as gusty, but we did get even more much needed rain, and our very first temperature below freezing since April 4th! Freeze Advisories were out Wednesday night in to Thursday morning, and growing season ended as we reached 29.3­­° at my house Thursday morning.

We'll have another front sweep through tonight in to tomorrow which I'm going to go ahead and classify as our third of four season-changing fronts. One more and I think we'll be in full on fall and winter mode. That's when you'll see posts on this site ramp up!

The FROPA

I've probably posted this a bunch, but I always feel like we need 3-4 strong cold fronts to clear the area before we can get in to a winter-like pattern. Well, today was the first one. Finally. It's probably a couple weeks later than expected.

Above is timelapse from my roof cam. Ignore the watermark at the bottom with weather stats, apparently that wasn't working at the time. The most noticeable thing is how the camera began to bounce around after the rain stopped. 

Within 15 minutes the temperature dropped 10 degrees and the winds were howling at 30-40mph. 

With a high in the 50s tomorrow, this will be the first time since the beginning of September it'll actually feel like fall!

Ending the Mini-Drought, Still No "Fall"

On Thursday we ended our 20 day dry spell here in Columbus with a little under half an inch on average across the area. Then yesterday that amount was crushed with about 1.5" across Central Ohio thanks to the remnants of Hurricane Nate and a trough just north of the area that run out all of that tropical moisture.

The lawns needed it, but what little foliage we had didn't. Lots of leaves came down, even without changing colors. It'll be a pretty ugly autumn here in Central Ohio.

So, once again, where IS fall? We're still above normal for at least the next week, with highs in the 70s and 80s. But even if we look 8-14 days out, the CPC still has us well above average for the period:

Past this period I feel like we'll finally fall in to a period of storminess, with troughs plowing down from Canada weekly through the end of the month and in to November. Still, nothing looks like a true cool down in the mid range.

So until then, keep the short sleeves out!