I say (N. Hemisphere) Fall starts ...
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Vernal equinox in September... (Score:2)
Vernal equinox 9/22 or 9/23
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ITYM "autumnal equinox", it's on the 23rd this year.
Since the equinoxes align with the tilting of the axis, one would think that they, and the solstices, would fall in the exact center of their seasons. However, temperature lag throws this off. I.e. in California, I consider fall as September, October, and much of November, and the greatest impact it has tends to be on clothes. So, come Labor Day I shelve my summer clothes and switch to more autumn items.
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Here in Atlanta my thermometer read 104 today. Autumn it is not.
Fell equinox (Score:2)
ITYM "autumnal equinox", it's on the 23rd this year.
Surely in the US if you insist on calling the season 'fall' this should be the "fell equinox"? Apart from being more consistent with your language it sounds far more ominous than "autumnal".
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the seasons change when they change (Score:2)
The equinoxes and solstices define something but they don't define seasons. When people who pay no attention to astronomy per se parrot "today is the first day of Fall/Autumn" on the 23rd, they're not saying anything of significance. When they say "today is the first day of Winter" a few days before Christmas, it will be equally meaningless.
In part that's because seasons change gradually, and the weather can go back and forth between summer-like and fall-like. But it's also because the equinoxes and sols
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Which is complete bullshit because it then means that Winter doesn't arrive until the Winter Solstice which makes no sense because by that point you've already run through half the cold weather.
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Depends on where you live. These are just convenient orbital milestones, but where I've lived, mainly in the South and Southwestern US they are entirely appropriate.
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My preference is yyyy-mm-dd. The alpha order actually means something.
When the leaves change.... (Score:3)
I say it's Fall when leaves start changing color and falling off and school starts. Though that leaf system doesn't work well for people in larger cities.
We have evergreens (Score:2)
You insensitive clod!
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Agreed. Fall "starts" when the first leaves turn red and yellow. Winter takes over on the day of the first snowfall which "sticks", which means often you can't recognize winter for a couple days.
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Right now there have been a couple of license plates with new colors, but since it is still over 100 (only 107 today, cooling trend), I won't see some of the new colors until October or November.
Actually, Phoenix has some very short winters. Last year it was on a Tuesday.
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Works pretty well in Manhattan. I agree with the leaf test, although the other test is that it's when the air turns crisp and the dew starts to form consistently in the morning.
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Don't have "Fall" (Score:3)
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And it lasts from early august until mid June, followed by spring (until mid July), summer (ideally a week or two but often skips a year). No winter.
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Indeed. Our silly American friends and their habit of naming things differently :D
And my definition is basically 1st September as despite any official (and complicated) definitions I consider the seasons to be March/April/May, June/July/August, September/October/November and December/January/February
Seems to work out well - think it was the 1st that I first had to wear a coat again.
But you also get summery days, like today.
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Autumn is used in the U.S. as well. It's just considered a bit stodgy. But if you say it, most people will know what you mean.
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Most people?
If a typical American doesn't know the definition of autumn, he should be slapped for being stupid.
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Well, if we always slapped someone here for being stupid, nobody would ever be able to get anything done.
In retrospect. (Score:2)
I define autumn in retrospect.
In a week or so, I'll probably think "damn, it's not summer any more".
I wandered round London in a t-shirt today, so it could easily be summer. But I took a coat and a sweater with me, just in case.
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In NZ we typically use "Autumn" too. However the phrase, "spring forward, fall back" is still commonly used as a memory aid for which direction to change clocks come Daylight Savings transitions
Yes, I'm afraid we also suffer the curse of DST.
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Sunday.
In Wisconsin (Score:2)
Wisconsin really only has 3 seasons - there typically is no Spring to speak of. We tend to have "Indian summers" and for me fall really starts when the temp consistently falls below 70, the humidity drops, and the air starts to feel "crisp". Yesterday we had to turn the AC because the humidity was atrocious - yet school has already started. I think we're getting close, and I'm actually looking forward to it, due to the many upcoming Oktoberfests going on around here. I guess I would agree that fall beings o
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Crap Summer (Score:2)
It was the coolest here in the UK since 1993...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14723674 [bbc.co.uk]
Summer? What summer? Oh, that were those few hot days in June.
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What do you do if summer falls on a Wednesday?
Gloves (Score:2)
Given that I work in astronomy, I was tempted to vote for the IAU option. But my real definition is: When I start to wear gloves.
I don't recognize your arbitrary "SEASONS" (Score:3)
Temperature (Score:2)
When the temp drops below 55Â.
"What do you do? What do you do?"
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That would be the temperature where trees shatter if you tap them, and you have to wear a special protective suit to go outside. No, the OP means 55 celsius, when trees stop spontaneously combusting in direct sunlight. Global warming, you know...
Fall? (Score:2)
We don't have that season. Here in San Francisco, there are four seasons:
Rainy Season: Nov. 1 through Mar. 31
Season of False Hope: Apr. 1 through May 31
Foggy Season: June 1 through Aug. 31
Summer: Sept. 1 though Oct. 31
All dates approximate. Your seasons may vary.
I'll use the equinox for official stuff, but.... (Score:3)
Last week: Fucking hot.
This week: Cold, progressing to fucking cold.
In my mind, fall got here this week.
(For the curious, a relatively warm day in winter is "fucking cold" and more profanity gets added in for every 10ish degree drop.)
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(For the curious, a relatively warm day in winter is "fucking cold" and more profanity gets added in for every 10ish degree drop.)
The part of Canada I'm in pretty much bottoms out at "so fucking cold it feels like you dipped your balls in liquid nitrogen".
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The part of Canada I'm in pretty much bottoms out at "so fucking cold it feels like you dipped your balls in liquid nitrogen".
You had LIQUID nitrogen? Where I grew up, our nitrogen was frozen solid, and we damned well liked it that way.
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On the bright side, no terminators though.
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Too hot to be Fall (Score:2)
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I can never interpret those. What's that in real temperature?
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Using a different temperature scale isn't ignorance. It's just a different scale. Because the scales require an offset and a multiply to convert, it's actually pretty hard to develop a mental model for both. I know that 20C is 68F, and that 37C is 98F, and of course that 0C is freezing and 100C is boiling, but it's still difficult to relate to temperatures given in C, because temperatures are pretty much _always_ given in fahrenheit here, and so that's what feeds our mental models.
Perhaps the question
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No, you just demonstrated that you're not ignorant (and therefore not proud of it). Since the conversion formula is a bit of a pain to perform in one's head, you've memorized a few good reference points*, so you can work out with a brief pause that 35C is nearly human body temperature. In other words, you can figure it out, and you don't ask others to do it for you. The people who can't figure it out, and who make a point of telling people that... they are ignorant and proud of it.
*10C=50F is another han
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I've never understood why so many in the US are so proud of their ignorance. Or is it not pride, but some kind of slapstick comedy - oooh, look how ignorant I am, hahaha?
If you read comments posted by users of the SI, you will find at least as many that they profess the exact same pride in ignorance of the US system of measures. As a bonus, it will be mistakenly called "Imperial".
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1760 yards in a mile(was someone drunk when deciding that?).
No, British. It's a species of drunk.
N. Hemesphere sucks (Score:2)
You top enders suck. You're going to be whining about how cold it is. I'm going into summer because I live on the awesome side. It's 25C outside (yes Centigrade, the proper way to measure temperature) today, in fact the future's so bright I'm going to need shades.
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Skiing's over, eh? Sux2bu.
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Be gone heathen devil. If God wanted us to use Celsius he wouldn't have given us Fahrenheit.
Obvious answer: (Score:2)
When do you want it to start?
Fall Starts (Score:2)
Yom Teruah aka Rosh Hoshannah.
Varies from year to year, between late Aug to Early Oct.
Not on Earth (Score:2)
I'm in LEO you insensitive clod!
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But the Sun is in Aquarius.
Seasons are tied to the equinoxes and solstices... (Score:2)
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Nonsense. Why should the longest day be the *start* of summer? It would make more sense for it to be the middle of summer. We could call it something like "midsummer's day".
In reality, seasons are meant to describe periods of similar weather. What seasons you have and when they are depends on where in the world you are. There's no reason they should be tied to particular solar events - and in any case, there's nothing really special about the solstices and the equinoxes - days being longest or equal to
It's gotta get cool first, really. (Score:2)
Which means, here in Mississippi, that'll be sometime in Late October. Our State Fair is mid-October, after all.
The Leaves (Score:2)
Colorado (Score:2)
Colorado has two seasons: summer and winter. Between summer and winter are periods of confusion where it may be comfortable early in the day and snowing later in the day or snowing one day and comfortable the next. Some people attempt to label the transition from winter to summer as spring and the transition from summer to winter as fall but the reality is you just get a mixture of summer and winter weather. My best personal example is cutting the grass around noon one mid-May day (wearing shorts and a t
silly construct (Score:2)
many areas of the world don't have 4 distinct seasons, for some it's better to say 'wet' and 'dry' for others it's many seasons, hot-wet, hot-dry, etc, so say whatever suits your climate.
When the temperature doesn't reach above 75F (Score:2)
Local deffinition (Score:2)
7 consecutive days the high is 90 F . Or is that winter?
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7 consecutive days the high is less then 90 deg F. Damn formatting.
1 Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec season starts make more sense (Score:5, Informative)
The seasons here (Australia) start on 1 Mar/1 Jun/1 Sep/1 Dec, rather than being based on the solstices and equinoxes as they are in the US. Using those dates is:
a) easier to remember; and
b) better matches the actual temperatures (this is true in the northern hemisphere as well)
To clarify what I mean by (b), you will note that in most non-tropical areas of the world, the long-term average temperature minima and maxima fall on or around 15 Jan and 15 Jul each year and do a bell curvish kinda thing before and after that. Hence seasons that run from 1 Dec-28 Feb and 1 Jun-31 Aug make sense because they are straddling the coldest and hottest parts of the year almost exactly. It means that 'winter' genuinely is, on average, the coldest three month period, with the coldest part of all falling in the middle of that period.
The reason the solstices aren't a good date on which to start seasons (at least from a weather perspective) is because temperature changes 'lag behind' the change in the sunlight. So in the northern hemisphere, although the shortest day is on or around 21 December, the lowest (average) temperature is experienced around the middle of January (over the whole hemisphere - there will obviously be local variations). If we used 21 Dec as the start of winter as they do in the US, that'd mean the coldest period of winter wasn't the middle of winter, but rather the period about 3 weeks into it (i.e. towards the start of winter).
Indeed, the US NWS/NOAA themselves uses the 1 Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec seasons, referring to them as 'meteorological seasons', for exactly this reason. I think it's a better system, at least in terms of thinking of seasons as 'changes in the weather' rather than celestially-based things.
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Your analysis is intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Missing option (Score:2)
When college football starts, obviously.
puddles (Score:2)
In the Southwest... (Score:2)
In the Phoenix area, we won't get "fall-like" temperatures until late October.
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What's a fall? (Score:2)
4 seasons - just don't know what order they come (Score:2)
We just don't know when we'll get them.
Take the Winter Olympics last year - February and we got almost no snow, 20C temperatures and tourists running around in shorts and T-shirts.
Or "Summer" this year - that was an extension of "too wet" until after the middle of August - and now that September is here, looks like it might extend for another month or two.
Snow in May, warm weather at Christmas, love it.
The saying
When ... (Score:2)
... the DOT stops jackhammering up all the roads.
Spring is when they patch up all the jackhammered holes and take down the construction barriers. Just in time for the next re-paving season to begin.
Simple. Fall begins... (Score:2)
...when I miss a step.
Leaves are already falling. (Score:2)
My treas are dropping brown leaves. Doesn't that make it fall? Of course, I live in Texas so they might just be dead.
Fall is when the season changes... (Score:2)
In Canada... (Score:2)
Before Winter and after summer. In otherwords, you never see it coming. Though there's a 3 week period when the leaves change colours. This spring thing too? I keep hearing about it, but it's usually winter than summer here.
Here in Northern Ohio, USA ... (Score:2)
Defined by people (Score:2)
It's that time between when people quit whining that it's too hot, and start whining that it's too cold.
Get back to basics (Score:2)
Back when the men were men, and the children were workers, it was Harvest, not Autumn, nor Fall.
Life was so much simpler then.
Missing option (Score:3)
I live in the Southern Hemisphere and I call it Autumn, you insensitive clod!
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That would be the IAU option, they define the equinoxes.
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And here I was, thinking the equinoxes defined themselves.
Self definition is an interesting problem... (Score:2)
Well, in a sense, I suppose so. Although strictly, the only things I can think of that truly define themselves are dictionaries and Mankind.
Actually, even those are debatable. I mean a dictionary could be said to contain definitions rather than perform the act of definition itself. And while you can make a very strong case for all definitions originating from people, we don't seem capable of creating a single accepted definition of what it means
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Fall only counts for football and retail...
School?
Re:I don't care- I don't live there... (Score:4, Funny)
I live in Hawaii, at 21Â 18' north, so we don't really GET four seasons, only two.
I'm in Finland. We get six seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter, winter, winter.
Autumn started here some time in August, BTW.
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It is september now, I hope you're in your long-johns.
More than four seasons (Score:3)
I live in Hawaii, at 21Ã 18' north, so we don't really GET four seasons, only two.
I'm in Finland. We get six seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter, winter, winter.
We have a lot seasons here in New England, too: Winter, mud, black fly, mosquito, tourist, hunting. Winter is longer than all of the others combined, although not as long as your winter(s), I'm sure.
Northern Hemisphere (Score:3)
I live in Hawaii, at 21Â 18' north...
Given your post's title "I don't care- I don't live there..." you don't seem to realise that the northern hemisphere actually goes all the way to the equator so actually you DO live there!
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We get 4 seasons.
Almost winter
Winter
Still winter
Construction
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Jesus fuck lord in heaven stop with that shit! Just say the month or the goddamned quarter
It's been a while since I've seen someone get so worked up over something that trivial.
In any case, given that most American companies' fiscal years don't match the calendar year - if they announced by quarter you'd probably be more confused than you are now.
BTW the seasons in America correlate pretty closely with the seasons in the rest of the northern hemisphere.
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When the trees aren't green anymore I'm sure that the dark times are coming.
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Here in the northern parts of Sweden fall tends to start a bit earlier. I'd say we have fall right now, the trees are turning orange and yellow and the outside temperature hasn't been above 15C for a couple of weeks. Not to mention the near-constant cloud cover and rain...
Summers here are beautiful but the winters are too long, too dark and quite honestly downright depressing.
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Nono, Awesome is the season when the water becomes solid and slippery. The season you're referring to is "unpleasantly hot," when water forms on the surface of one's skin and evaporates, leaving a salty residue.
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Autumnal Equinox - It's NOT Science, Damnit! (Score:2)
Science is a method of gaining knowledge based on careful observation of the real world.
My observations of the real world indicate that Autumn is already beginning, and your authoritarian dogma saying otherwise can go stuff itself. :)
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I've already had to rake leaves once this year, but the temperature at that time was over 35 C. (Extended drought is killing quite a few trees around here). So, my mixed observation indicators would indicate it's probably F'nshnork'gll around here. Lesson: Don't try to correlate data as a single conclusion, when you're observing multiple independent variables.
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Same in Seattle, but around here there's some place we can go just about year round to find the weather we want. Snow in summer is a bit tough, but we do occasionally have it as an option, or all year if we're wiling to settle for it already being on the ground.