On our trip to Burke's Garden yesterday, I was pleased to see the roadsides lined with wild Blue Asters. I've been watching for them in our area, but you usually have to wander into the woods to find them this time of year. We used to see them even in August on our woodland trails. I have given up on keeping our trail in good shape since construction and an ownership change have taken place. I couldn't interest the county in buying the nearly one hundred acres of mountain land. They were more interested in trails along the river instead of up the side of a mountain.
If the truth were ever to be known, I'm sure they wanted the tax revenue for the houses that will certainly eventually fill the tract.
The Blue Asters are a sign of the changing seasons. It has been unseasonably warm and dry this September. My oldest daughter tells me the weather people in the Washington, DC area are saying that this September is the driest on record. This has led to the absolute best September and October tomatoes that we have ever had. They'll only last another week or two, but they have been delicious.
With the end of the tomatoes in sight and the countdown to the last mowing of the yard in progress, it's time to start thinking about winter. Our Canadian neighbors think about it well before us. That's natural since our cold weather comes from them.
For those of us who expect our natural gas bills to set new records, the temperatures this winter can be a subject of serious speculation. A forecaster from Environment Canada had this to say into today's Toronto Star (free registration required).
Phillips says the trend over the last few years has been for milder winters.
"We've had a preponderance of winters in the last several years that have been warmer than normal," he says.
"The old-timers will tell me, `Yeah the winters aren't what they used to be,' and I used to think, `No, no, you just don't have a good memory.' Well, they're absolutely right," Phillips says.
"I don't know whether it's global warming or what have you but to get a good old-fashioned cold winter, there is less probability now than there used to be."
This got me to thinking about stories that my mother used to tell. She was born in 1910 and told us of stories of her father taking teams of horses out on their frozen mill pond to cut ice and store it for the summer. That would not be too much of a surprise had she not lived in the foothills of North Carolina, just west of Winston-Salem. The mill pond which was part of so many of her stories was near Yadkinville, North Carolina which is not exactly known as one the earth's cold spots.
In an effort to do a little climate research on my own, I found some a report done in North Carolina which indicated that the 1910s and 1920s had the fewest tropical storms since they started keeping records in the 1890s. Since then the trend has been steadily upward with a noticeable peak in the 1950s.
I'm certainly no climate expert, but we appear to be in a warming trend since I cannot remember anyone telling me about people skating on ponds in central North Carolina much less driving teams of horses onto the frozen ponds.
At this point a warmer winter would be welcome. I like the common sense approach of the Environment Canada forecaster. He's the antithesis of the weather hype we sometimes see on the Weather Channel.
Phillips says the reason it's likely to be so mild for much of the country is the unusually hot summer has left heat trapped in the ground and water.
"(The last) four months have been warmer than normal so there's a lot of stored heat in the lakes and the rivers and the land and the soil," Phillips says.
"It's going to take a little while before that heat gets away."
He says it's pretty clear that an early winter isn't imminent because it hasn't even hit the northern parts of Canada yet.
"Until winter arrives in the North, it's not going to arrive in the south; that's where winter comes from," Phillips says.
Environment Canada is calling for a warmer than normal winter on Canada's east and west coasts. I'll look forward to the forecast from the folks at NOAA. Here in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, we know that strange things happen when it comes to weather. We've even seen snowstorms get trapped here along the sides of the mountains. If it stays a little warmer on our mountain, I won't miss the annual challenge of getting down our icy mountain.
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