First Day of Autumn in the Colorado Front Range

Astronomical autumn began at 7:30 AM MDT this morning. From this point until the Vernal Equixnox on March 20, 2021, the nights will be longer than the days. If you get up early enough in the morning, you can already get a good glimpse of the winter constellations (Auriga, Orion, Canis Major, Taurus, Gemini) high in the pre-dawn sky.  Today also marked the setting of the sun over the North Pole, and as we progress into the Fall more and more of the Northern Hemisphere will be experiencing longer nights and decreased daytime heating.  As  result of this, over the next 30 days or so we will be seeing more and more cold air masses diving south into the United States from Canada. Here are the average high and low temperatures for the next few months from my records for Nederland:

 

September 22    High: 68 F Low: 41 F

October 1:          High 61 F  Low  38 F

October 15:        High 57 F  Low 35 F

October 31:        High 47 F  Low 30 F

If you like warm weather, it is all down hill from here.

Over the past few days our high temperatures have been hovering in the upper 60s to near 70 F with night time lows dropping back in the mid to upper 40s F. As you can see, this is slightly above normal for this time of year. The next 5 days – Wednesday through Sunday – will offer pretty much the same here in the higher Foothills with temps in the 67- 70 F range and mainly dry conditions. Even though there were a few showers around today, it looks like moisture will be on the decrease for the latter half of this week.

Temperatures will cool down by about 10 degrees F by early next week, but there is no sign of rain or snow in the near future. I was really hoping that our early September snowfall would bring a change to our dry pattern, but here we are again with little or no observed or forecast precipitation.

The latest  6 to 10 day forecast is warm and dry for us:

 

6-10

I am working on my 2020-2021 Nederland Winter Outlook. I will be posting this shortly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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