The first frost
The first frost this autumn · temperature minimum last night: -3.9 °C · air temperature this morning: -2.5 °C
An autumn morning in Skelleftehamn
Two days ago was autumnal equinox, start of the astronomical autumn. Today I managed to be at the coast shortly before sunrise at 6:26. The sea was amazingly calm considering the wind of the last days, and the small cotton-wool clouds were coloured rose.
The sun rose over the island Flottgrundet and started to illuminate the rocky shore and the coloured trees.
The mushrooms sprout in the meadow next to the house of the pilot station. I lay down in the grass and made a photo from a small fly agaric covering the sun.
The morning was crisp which temperatures round 1 °C and for the first time I had to scrape ice from the windshield of my new car. While Skelleftehamn looks autumnal, other places as Hemavan or Kilpisjärvi have got the first snow these days. Even though I took my first winter bath already yesterday (water temperature 9.4 °C) it will be some time before winter comes to Skelleftehamn.
Time to collect some warm autumn colours and time for a strongly over-edited photo of the trees on a breakwater. It’s kitsch in some way, but I like it anyway.
Foggy Skellefteälven
When I saw the fog moving above the river Skellefteälven this morning I had to interrupt my drive to work to take some pictures. It was the coldest morning that I experienced here since last winter. Air temperatures were still above zero but the first ground frost was visible.
When it comes to seasons I like winter the most, but autumn is so beautiful, too.
“50 Shades of Red”
A herald of autumn
It’s still quite warm in Skelleftehamn, hardly below 10 °C the last nights, but today it rained and some of the birch trees start casting off their leaves. Summer 2018 is history, autumn is coming.
Retrospect: a rainy autumn
The day before yesterday a blog post on the weather page of Balderskolan caught my eye. The school Balderskolan in Skellefteå has its own weather station and has been collecting statistical data since 2002.
Here some statistics from August to October the last three years. The data is taken from the blog entry. And as you see – the last months have been very wet indeed compared to the two years before.
Number of days with rainfall
| 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| August | 7 st | * 11 st | 18 st |
| September | 6 st | 5 st | 21 st |
| October | 6 st | 8 st | 19 st |
| Total | 19 st | * 24 st | 58 st |
Precipitation in mm
| 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| August | 39 mm | * 38 mm | 59 mm |
| September | 28 mm | 18 mm | 81 mm |
| October | 4 mm | 5 mm | 79 mm |
| Total | 71 mm | * 61 mm | 219 mm |
(* data for the first seven days in August 2016 is missing)
The autumn leaves …
Most bushes and trees have realised, that summer is history and even autumn has come to an end. They all shed their leaves in the last weeks. Only the lilacs are quite stubborn and try to keep their leafage with all their might.
The cold wind gusts of the last night however did not only bring a bit of snow but also started to tear of the still green lilacs leaves. One of these leaves landed on my car hood where it slowly snowed over.
So lilacs beware, winter is on its way!
Wet snow and slush
It snowed the last days and it’s snowing right now in Skelleftehamn.
In Skelleftehamn it already snowed this morning but it was too warm and the snow didn’t settle.
In town it was slightly colder, but with temperatures still above zero the snow was very wet and soon became damp, slowly transforming into puddles of snow slush.
Anyway it’s still the end of October so it may take a while till the first real winter snow.
A first glimpse of winter
I’m sitting in the bus travelling to Skellefteå to go to work. This time I don’t travel from Skelleftehamn as usual but from Umeå where Annika and I landed yesterday evening after our one-week journey through Scotland.
While it was warm in Scotland (hardly below 10 °C, up to 17 °C) it is quite cold in Northern Sweden. Not really wintry cold, but cold enough that the lakes start to freeze over and precipitation is more snow than rain.
Time to change to dubbdäck – to studded tyres!
∞ Infinite rain ∞
Ok, guys, let’s face it: It always has been raining, it’s raining right now and it will never stop raining again until the end of the world!
Never ever I have expected such a rainy autumn! Since I’ve been back from the hiking tour on the Kungsleden it rained most of the days and in the spare moments without precipitation it was cloudy anyway.
Sometimes it was windstill, sometimes it was stormy, but it rained. Either as a steady rain or more like a curtain of a dense fog or sometimes as a series of cloudbursts. So my daily outfit has been almost the same for weeks: A sturdy rain parka and rubber boots.
Of course the sun came out little here and there but mostly just for a short time. I can count the days with much sun with the fingers of one hand. And I don’t need all fingers!
Today I looked at one of the many puddles of water. It was some centimetres deep. Some yellow leaves – probably victims of last night’s squalls – floated have under the water surface, which was rippled by the ongoing rain. And then I saw it:
The Sign Of Infinity!
I looked at the sign and all at once I got the dreadful message: It always has been raining, it’s raining right now and it will never stop raining again until the end of the world!
Addendum (11 October)
If I understand the weather statistics of the school Balderskolan in Skellefteå correctly, we got 63mm of rain yesterday. That’s more rain than the average precipitation in Skellefteå all October! No wonder, that some of the puddles in Bonnstan were more than 15 cm deep. Since these puddles were covered with yellow birch leaves it looked really beautiful. What a pity, that I only had my iPhone to shoot this image:
