Weather Challenge for October 11

A couple of days have passed since I last posted about our weather and the weather has warmed up quite a bit. The mountains that we can see have snow, yet the hillside near our house that rises a few hundred feet above us has no snow now. It has melted off, as it has around the house.

Yesterday, the temperatures got all the way up to 45° F after dropping down to 19°. The low temperature was 14° below normal and the high temperature was 15° below normal. That is still above the records for low temperatures. The record low for yesterday was 11°, set quite a few years ago, but the average is just over freezing. The record high temperature for that date was much warmer than we got. That record high was 80°, with 60° being the average. Yesterday was warmer than it was a year ago, though not by much.

Today is supposed to be warmer still, with the predicted temperature at 53°. That would still be about 7° below normal but that is much closer to normal than it has been. Our humidity is still high; about 96%, with only a small chance of precipitation today (10% chance).

The days are getting noticeably shorter, too. The length of our day today will be 11 hours 8 minutes, with the day getting 3-4 minutes shorter each day, due to our latitude. This has a substantial bearing on how hot and cold it is this time of year. Fewer hours of daylight means that the sunlight doesn’t have as long to heat the ground. It is also coming in at a greater angle, so the sunlight isn’t as strong as in the summer.

All in all, today should be a warm, sunny day, from the sound of it. I’m thankful for that as I still have some work to get done outside before it gets too cold to do it.

The picture is how it looked a few days ago. Most of the snow in the foreground is now gone, but some of that on the hillside is still there. I like pictures like this because it clearly shows the layering of the rocks, also called the striations. Despite our altitude, these are mostly sedimentary rocks, from a time long ago when this whole area was at the bottom of a shallow sea.