The next 10 days will bring a little bit of everything to the Hudson Valley.

Starting on Tuesday, an Arctic cold front will make it feel like late November, then a surge of warmth next weekend into the following will make it feel more like September again!

The week ahead will even feature heavy snow around the Great Lakes (measured in feet in northern Michigan) and sub-freezing temperatures reaching as far as the Deep South. In fact, only four states will likely be untouched by sub-35˚F temperatures: Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Delaware.

In the Hudson Valley, once the cold front swings through on Monday night, it will be dry and cool. These conditions will accelerate us toward peak fall color 🍁

📉 Midway through the month, the region was running 1 to 2˚F colder than average. It’s been 13 years since the Hudson Valley last had an October that finished more than 1˚F below average. With the chilly forecast below, we’ll remain in the running to break the 13-year streak. If you haven’t run your heater yet, you probably will this week!

Monday will feature some passing showers as the cold front approaches — not an all day rain, just a little bit here and there.

The chill will be noticeable when you step outside on Tuesday as high temperatures only rise into the low 50s. Wednesday and Thursday look similarly cold with overnight temperatures dipping below freezing for three consecutive nights.

A late week change in the wind direction will turn the weather pattern on its head, with milder conditions beginning Friday (near 60).

At this point, the weekend is looking milder yet with highs well into the 60s.

Much of the week of the 24th may run warmer than average. Another pattern change could occur around Halloween, but it’s way out there 🎃

☀️ To put it simply, the weather next weekend into the following week will probably look a little something like this:

OK, no, there won’t be cruise ships navigating the Hudson River and berthing in Newburgh, but the weather does look nice!

Wooly bear-ly scientific

🐛 Have you spotted a wooly bear caterpillar this fall? What does it mean for winter⁉️

Believe it or not, this well-known piece of folklore originated at Bear Mountain State Park in the 1940s and 50s. It was concluded that the larger the brown band, the milder the winter that followed ~ but the story is more about fun than science…

Here’s an excerpt from almanac.com:

“In the fall of 1948, Dr. C. H. Curran, curator of insects at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, took his wife 40 miles north of the city to Bear Mountain State Park to look at woolly bear caterpillars. Dr. Curran collected as many caterpillars as he could in a day, determined the average number of reddish-brown segments, and forecast the coming winter weather through a reporter friend at The New York Herald Tribune.

Dr. Curran’s experiment, which he continued over the next eight years, attempted to prove scientifically a weather rule of thumb that was as old as the hills around Bear Mountain. Between 1948 and 1956, Dr. Curran’s average brown-segment counts ranged from 5.3 to 5.6 out of the 13-segment total, meaning that the brown band took up more than a good third of the woolly bear’s body.

The corresponding winters were milder than average, and Dr. Curran concluded that the folklore has some merit and might be true. But Curran was under no scientific illusion: He knew that his data samples were small. Although the experiments legitimized folklore to some, they were simply an excuse for having fun. Curran, his wife, and their group of friends escaped the city to see the foliage each fall, calling themselves The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear.

Thirty years after the last meeting of Curran’s society, the woolly bear brown-segment counts and winter forecasts were resurrected by the nature museum at Bear Mountain State Park. The annual counts have continued, more or less tongue in cheek, since then.”

So there you have it! Find out if I agree with this wooly bear’s mild winter forecast in my official 2022-23 Hudson Valley winter outlook, to be released next weekend!

Premium subscribers will catch a glimpse of the outlook before then 😉

Have a “bear-y” good week 😄