 |
| Purple blooms and sunflowers continue to survive amid the fallen leaves in my St. Albans, Vermont gardens. We haven't had any really hard freezes yet this autumn. |
The current record for latest freeze, as measured at the Burlington International Airport, is October 26, 2018. It did get down to 33 degrees at the airport on October 11, but that wasn't quite a freeze.
There are TONS of asterisks to this record, however.
Measurements at the airport only go back to 1941, so this will be the latest first freeze since around the beginning of World War II. Weather measurements for Burlington prior to 1941 were taken closer to Lake Champlain.
In general, the closer to Lake Champlain you are, the less likely you are to have early frosts. The record for latest first frost as measured prior to 1941 is November 1. (I'm not sure of the year),
Burlington, at least the airport if not downtown, could well see a frost by November 1. Strong high pressure is forecast to settle in overhead around Friday and Saturday (October 28 and 29).
The air associated with this high pressure is not likely to be really cold. It's not coming from the Arctic. But by this far into autumn, anytime you get a clear, calm night, you should expect a frost. And chances are high we'll have just that kind of weather.
Fall and spring freezes are incredibly local affairs. One neighborhood might stay just above 32 degrees while a freeze hits just two doors down. It's just a matter of whether the air was calm enough long enough on a clear early morning to allow temperatures to dip below 32 degrees.
For Vermont as a whole, most of us had a freeze somewhere either around October 3 or in the October 10-11 time frame. That's more or less average timing for a first freeze of the autumn.
Even so, we haven't had a lot of cold nights, and the freezes we have had weren't especially harsh. I've noticed that even though most of the leaves are off the trees, garden and potted flowers continue to happily bloom in much of Vermont. This is the time of year I clear out my perennial gardens, but I've been reluctant to cut down parts of them. They're still pretty.
The quirk of no freeze yet at the airport in South Burlington makes for this weird stat: A record cold wave hit the South last week. So at least officially, southern cities like Jackson, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama and Tallahassee, Florida had their first freeze before Burlington, Vermont.
The first snows of the season in Vermont are late this autumn, too, but so far, that's not setting any records.
I couldn't really find any data on the latest first trace of snow of the season in Burlington. But I do know the average date of a first snow flurry of autumn is October 15, so we're past that. I know we've seen many years in which the first couple of snowflakes of autumn held off until November.
Actually, even Montréal, Edmonton, and parts of Québec City are having first freezes later than Tallahassee this year. Edmonton had its first freeze on Oct 23 and the other two have yet to have it, at least in the urban area. Granted, those places are urban areas, and similar urban areas in the South didn't reach freezing either (Tallahassee's airport is in a cold spot just outside the city), but still.
ReplyDelete