Hot Autumn Is Messing With Our Fall Foliage

Still a lot of green amid record high temperatures
in these hills near Richmond,  Vermont on Sunday.
Fall colors should be peaking now, but they are
very late due to a hot autumn.

It's fitting that because we've had such a bizarre autumn in the weather department here in Vermont, our famed foliage season is off kilter, too.

In and near the Champlain Valley, there's still a lot of green on the hills at a time when the foliage should be at peak.

No wonder. Those crisp fall days we should have seen in late September were overtaken by a very humid, unprecedented stretch of 90 degree weather.

After a brief cool down to normal temperatures a week ago, it warmed up again over the past five days, culminating in a record high of 80 degrees in Burlington, Vermont Sunday afternoon.

The dew point, a measure of how humid it is, reached 69 degrees late Sunday morning in Burlington. Such readings usually only come during the most oppressive midsummer weather. I've never seen anything like that in October.

All this has left the forests confused. Aside from the late season green, some trees that normally turn brilliant seem blah, and some trees that usually make me go "meh" in the autumn are gorgeous.

I'm going to reserve judgement on how brilliant the colors will end up, but there are a couple of potentially bad signs.

I haven't driven around personally to see, but there are reports that in some places, especially toward northern New Hampshire that have reached peak, the colors were a bit subdued this year.  NECN says the weather extremes this year have put stress on trees, which seems to be leading to fewer of the red and orange blasts of color we are used to this time of year.

However, I have seen photos of the colors in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and things look as spectacular as ever up there.

Of course, the Northeast Kingdom should be well past peak by now, but this year they're late like everybody else.

I was in the western foothills of the Green Mountains near Richmond, Vermont yesterday and there were certainly wonderful splashes of color within the green. I'm not sure if the rest of the colors will pop later, or if things will be muted. We'll have to wait and see.

Encouragingly, it is going to be seasonably cool during the middle of this week (Highs in the 55-65 range, lows in the 30s to near 40) So I imagine that will make the colors blast out. A spate of coolish weather between the heat waves last week did seem to prompt some color to quickly appear.

We had very warm autumns in 2015 and 2016, too, so the foliage season was a little late those years, but it was spectacular.  So maybe this year will be the same, who knows?

Even if this year's autumn foliage proves to be not quite as spectacular as some years, it's still gorgeous. So get out and enjoy it. Better late than never, right?