The sun rose at 5:52 this morning, and will set 16 hours and 3 minutes later, at 9:55 this evening. I’m going to have to start watching the timing when I go someplace in the evening, since I don’t drive after sunset (or before sunrise, but that will be a while yet.) Maximum solar altitude is below 38°, and the sun now dips more than 12° below the horizon.
The weather is finally getting back to normal – forecast highs in the 50’s and 60’s, low in the 40’s. and occasional rain. August is normally our wettest month, so the high fire danger we’ve been in so far, tempered only by the lack of lightning strikes to start fires is unusual, as is the smoke. (Locally, the Army live-fire ranges have been under most suspicion.) But we’ve had over a third of an inch of rain in the past week – still below normal, but enough to break the drought. Considering we could be having our first light frosts by now, I really can’t complain that every day of the month so far has been warmer than normal.
The perennial flowers are pretty near the end of their season, but the annuals surrounding the raised beds are in their full glory. It won’t be too long until the leaves start turning, though – a few are already littering the lawn.
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The flowers are indeed leaving, the leaves in the trees are spotting yellow and forecast overnight temps up here near livengood 30-40 with a high in the low 60. I finished the new generator shed, winter storm flap on the entryway and started hauling fuel oil… I hear fall knocking on the door.
Is the fireweed through?
The jury is still out on whether a “double-peak” maximum will occur this year. The solar pole switch has already occurred a little earlier than projected and the F10.7cm radio flux progression shows the solar Maximum peaked around December 2012. The Umbral Magnetic Field (The force which holds sunspots together) continues to crash, which seems to lower the probability of a double-peak maximum this solar cycle, compared to the double-peak which occured about 10 years ago. It seems more likely that the Sun is heading toward a Grand Solar Minimum Event, perhaps on the scale of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715). A paper by Penn & Livingston el al postulates that once the Umbral Magnetic Field falls below 1,500 gauss, sunspots will virtually disappear, which could substantially lower global temperatures for many decades as was the case during the Maunder Minimum. Anyway, we can speculate all we want. It’ll be interesting to see what curve Mother Nature decides to throw at us. Given current evidence, it seems like we’re heading toward many decades of cooling temperatures. We’ll see soon enough.
Somehow I doubt it’ll make up for the change in greenhouse gasses.