AUTUMN COLLECTION

MY FIRST EUROPEAN AUTUMN
credits to Brian Chavez

Autumn

Autumn or fall is one of the four temperate seasons. Autumn marks the transition from summer into winter usually in March (Southern Hemisphere) or September (Northern Hemisphere) when the arrival of night becomes noticeably earlier.

The equinoxes might be expected to be in the middle of their respective seasons, but temperature lag (caused by the thermal latency of the ground and sea) means that seasons appear later than dates calculated from a purely astronomical perspective. The actual lag varies with region, so some cultures regard the autumnal equinox as "mid-autumn" whilst others with a longer lag treat it as the start of autumn. Meteorologists (and most of the temperate countries in the southern hemisphere) use a definition based on months, with autumn being September, October and November in the northern hemisphere, and March, April and May in the southern hemisphere.

Autumn in the United Kingdom lasts from September to November. The season is notorious for being unsettled—as cool polar air moves southwards following the sun, it meets the warm air of the tropics and produces an area of great disturbance along which the country lies. This combined with the warm ocean due to heating throughout the spring and summer, produces the unsettled weather of autumn. In addition, when the air is particularly cold temperatures on land may be colder than the ocean, resulting in significant amounts of condensation and clouds which bring rain to the country.

Atlantic depressions during this time can become intense and sustained winds of hurricane force (greater than 119 km/h/74 mph) can be recorded. Western areas, being closest to the Atlantic, experience these severe conditions to a significantly greater extent than eastern areas. As such, autumn, particularly the latter part, is often the stormiest time of the year. One particularly intense depression was the Great Storm of 1987.

However, the United Kingdom often experiences an 'Indian Summer', where temperatures particularly by night can be very mild and rarely fall below 10 °C (50 °F). Such events are aided by the surrounding Atlantic Ocean and seas being at their warmest, keeping the country in warm air, despite the relatively weak sun. Examples of this were in 1985, 2005 and 2006, where September, and October even more so, saw above average temperatures which felt more like a continuation of summer than autumn. Autumns since 2000 have been very mild with notable extremes of precipitation; the UK has seen some of its wettest and driest autumns since the millennium.

Coastal areas in the southern half of England have on average the warmest autumns, with mean temperatures of 10.7 to 13.0 °C (51.3 to 55.4 °F). Mountainous areas of Wales and northern England, and almost all of Scotland, experience mean temperatures between 1.7 and 7.5 °C (35.1 and 45.5 °F).