Slow-to-turn leaves have replaced slow-to-ripen tomatoes
The autumn leaves that each year turn our hills and valleys into a silent peal of color are one of Ma Nature’s most brilliant displays.
They have their own stage, their cast, their audience and, of course, their ‘critics’ like me.
The past few years have been a bit disappointing for Sharon and me as far as ‘leaf-peeping’ has been concerned, especially after living in Vermont for nearly 9 years.
The colors of the leaves, particularly the sugar maples and the birch trees, in New England are spectacular. Randy Mann, his wife Sally, Sharon and I would certainly recommend a trip to Vermont and the surrounding colorful region in late September and early October.
In 1999, Sharon and I took an extensive leaf-peeping bus tour through Vermont and parts of New Hampshire. The leaves were an awe-inspiring mixture of reds, purples, oranges and yellows that sprang from the hills in bursts of golden light.
I’m partially color-blind, but I still enjoyed the trip. Yellow is the ‘highlight’ of my color spectrum, followed by blue. I’m ‘red and green’ color-blind. I have trouble with stoplights, especially on rainy nights near dusk. But, in 50-plus years of driving, I’ve never had a traffic ticket or an accident that was my fault. I’ve never even had a parking ticket. I’m extremely careful, sort a ‘pokey-Joe.’ I have to be!
In answering a subscriber’s question, it’s not so much that the autumn leaves turn yellow, orange, red or purple, but they stop turning green. As Meteorologist Randy Mann says, “the tree’s food factory closes down.”
This food-making process takes place in the leaf which contains a chemical called chlorophyll, which also give the leaf it’s green color. This amazing chemical absorbs energy from sunlight that is used to transform carbon dioxide and water to carbohydrates, like sugars and starch.
As we move farther along into the fall season, the shorter daylight hours and cooler temperatures result in the leaves halting their food-making process. The chlorophyll breaks down and the leaf’s green color disappears. The other colors of red, orange, yellow pigments in the leaf now become visible making for spectacular displays before the leaves eventually fall off the trees. Sugar maples and birch trees often show the most array of color at this time of year.
The first hard freeze of the fall season actually ‘accelerates’ this annual loss of chlorophyll process in the leaves.
But, as of this last day of September writing, no such freeze is yet in sight. This is great for our tomatoes still ripening in the garden, but not so good for leaf-peeping activities in Camelot. Such is life in weather-blessed North Idaho.
NORTH IDAHO WEATHER REVIEW AND LONG-RANGE OUTLOOKS
September 2010 turned out to be a fantastic month weatherwise across the Inland Northwest. We had a near-record 244 hours of brilliant sunshine during the 30-day span ending on Thursday.
The last week of September was the fifth warmest such period on record locally in Coeur d’Alene since at least 1895 with an average daily maximum reading of 81 degrees, a whopping 13 degrees above normal!
The month’s warmest afternoon was the 86 degree reading on Sept. 3. It was nearly matched by the near-record 85 degrees this past Tuesday on Sept. 28.
It’s been abnormally warm throughout the arid western third of the U.S. in the past couple of weeks. The 113 degrees on Monday in downtown Los Angeles was an all-time record high beating the previous record of 112 degrees set on June 26, 1990, more than two decades ago.
Ironically, this record high was set during the fall season. This past summer in Los Angeles was the 9th coolest on record, again a prime example of our long-standing cycle of WIDE WEATHER ‘EXTREMES,’ the strongest such pattern in at least 1,000 years.
Our precipitation this September was just 0.90 inches on Player Drive in town. That compared with our 115-year normal of 1.58 inches and last September’s puny 0.45 inches.
Our total precipitation during the summer of 2010 from late June through late September was just 2.28 inches. That was barely half of the normal of 4.17 inches for a typical summer season and more than an inch less rainfall than we received during the summer of 2009 when 3.48 inches went into the rain bucket.
But, after a very warm start to the month of October, things should be changing drastically by the time one reads this article today.
We should plunge from the near-record mid 80s early in the weekend to high temperatures in the upper 50s and lower 60s by Oct. 4-7. Early morning lows may dip into the 30s in the normally chilly areas away from the warming bodies of water.
Despite the fact that no ‘killer-type’ freezes are yet in sight, I would cover those rapidly ripening (finally) tomatoes in the backyard garden as well as other cold-sensitive plants just to be safe.
Next week in ‘Gems,’ Randy Mann and I will update the current sea-surface temperature and sunspot data. Is La Nina already showing signs of weakening? Are sunspots increasing? Read the Oct. 11 issue of the Press and find out the truth.
I will issue my annual city-by-city snowfall outlooks for the fast-approaching winter of 2010-11 on Monday, Oct. 11.
Cliff Harris is a climatologist who writes a weekly column for The Press. His opinions are his own. E-mail sfharris@roadrunner.com