How many ways can I talk about dry air, sunshine and pleasant temperatures? That’s my challenge this morning. In reality, there isn’t much to say about the weather this week. We will experience plenty of sunshine, mixed at times with some clouds and a cooling trend during the latter half of the week will take us through the weekend.

Cooler Air
This is the first week of the fall season you’ll need to start using some of your fall wardrobe. It’s not going to be so cold you’ll need hats and gloves, although, if you are doing an early morning pre-sunrise walk you actually might.

Tomorrow morning and then several mornings late this week, temperatures will be in the 40s at sunrise. There isn’t any chance of frost, but low temperatures, comparatively speaking, be quite cool.

Muted Color?
It’s too early for foliage in most of the region, although some color is appearing in the northern mountains from Maine to New Hampshire and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Foliage this season is going to not be as brilliant as last year because of the warm dry weather. Already there are trees shedding their leaves without color. This is a protective mechanism to prevent the loss of water going into fall. The leaves of trees lose a tremendous amount of water daily through transpiration. You might have studied transpiration when you learned about photosynthesis. If the trees shed their leaves they won’t lose the same volume of water and can begin going dormant earlier. Studies have shown it can take 2 to 5 years for trees to recover from significant periods of dry weather. We are not in a major drought, but there are observable effects of the lack of rain.

Fall Arrives
This week begins the autumnal equinox and starting this weekend our nights will become longer than the days. On the autumnal equinox the sun is directly overhead at noon on the equator. This is also the day when the entire planet, no matter where you are, has basically 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. In far northern regions of the globe the loss of light is so rapid that there won’t be a sunrise by early November.

Check out the sunrise and sunset table for Resolute in northern Canada. This town will start experiencing no sunrise on November 7th. Mind you for some time after the sun doesn’t rise there is still plenty of light, but as time progresses it will eventually become dark enough so they need their lights all day.

You can expect dry and sunny weather each day this week. As I wrote, a storm passing to our south will bring an increase in some clouds on Tuesday, but no rain. The mildest day of the week will be Wednesday when temperatures will reach the middle 70s, especially away from the coast. The long range charts show little to no rain into October. I’ll start adding formal foliage reports to the blogs next week and let you know where the color is best and the best days to view the coming colors. Even a poor year of color will still bring pockets of brilliant scenes.