On Saturday, Sarah Antebi, a 19-year-old sophomore at Barnard and Columbia, paused for a moment while running through Central Park to take in the fall foliage at the lake. It’s unusually resplendent for this time of year, with many of the trees just starting to turn orange and yellow.
Like many New Yorkers, she was torn between enjoying the sight and feeling a sense of unease at how unusually warm and dry autumn has felt this year.
“All my friends are like, ‘We just want it to be fall,’” she said. “We just want to wear our sweaters.”
October is historically a fairly dry month, but the city has never quite seen an October like this. As of Tuesday morning, Central Park had gone 29 days without measurable rain, the second-longest dry streak in records that date back to 1869, Bill Goodman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New York confirmed. If no rain falls before midnight on Halloween, October would be the driest calendar month in the city’s history.
And if the city makes it all the way through Election Day without measurable rain — something forecasts suggest is likely — it will beat the current record for a dry streak: 36 days, set in October and November 1924.
(For rain to be considered measurable, the rain gauge at Belvedere Castle in Central Park must detect one-hundredth of an inch or more. The last time it did that was Sept. 29, when 0.78 of an inch fell.)
It was around mid-October last year when New Yorkers began begging for a chance to put away their umbrellas and parkas after experiencing rain every weekend for six straight weeks. This autumn, the attire across the Central Park resembles something closer to late-summer vibes.
“I don’t remember ever wearing, like, skirts and T-shirts at the end of October,” said Emily Berns, a high school history teacher who grew up in New York City. Her husband, Jonathan Berns, joined her on a stop in the park, wondering how long the blue skies and sunshine would last.
“If it’s this warm near Thanksgiving, then I’ll really start being nervous,” he said.
Temperatures are forecast to be in the 70s this week as November inches closer, which Mr. Goodman said was approaching record territory.
It’s a similar tale across the Eastern United States. Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were under a red flag wildfire warning this weekend, a rarity for the fall, as the National Weather Service warned that the “very dry conditions” could help fires spread. Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia are inching toward their own records for dry spells. Atlanta, hasn’t even seen a trace of rain this month, when a few tiny drops fall into a rain gauge but can’t be measured, making it their first ever true dry month. And last week, the United States Drought Monitor, a collaboration of several federal agencies and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, expanded warnings for parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. (The drought monitor notes that the New York City region is “abnormally dry,” but not in a drought.)
In New York, the dry spell is helping some of Central Park’s trees peak in color slightly earlier this year.
“A dry spell can definitely influence the onset of fall color,” said Karen Satterthwaite, the lead arborist with the Central Park Conservancy. “The effect of a dry fall is that it can speed up the degradation of chlorophyll, revealing the other vibrant pigments.”
The dryness can also influence the vibrancy of the leaves’ colors, she said. “So far we don’t seem to be seeing more brown leaves in Central Park than normal.”
Mr. Goodman said that there might be some rogue showers Tuesday night but that there was a pretty good chance that the city wouldn’t measure serious rainfall through Halloween. It’s even possible, he added, that the park may not see much if any rain through the middle of November. The weather models show some fronts coming through, but they are not likely to be major rain producers.
“Let’s soak it up while we have it, you know, as far as enjoying outdoor weather,” Mr. Goodman said.
Doing just that, Joan and David Covintree were sitting on a bench overlooking the Great Lawn. They took in the sun and traded turns placing tiles on a travel-size Scrabble board.
The unseasonably warm and dry October has been a boon for some of their favorite activities, like walking and watching amateur baseball in the park. Still, Ms. Covintree, 72, said the trend felt scary, too.
“You do worry about the weather,” she said. “When we were young, everything was kind of the same — it was warm in the summer and cold in the winter. You knew it would snow on a certain day.”
Mr. Covintree, wearing a gray and rainbow-striped Yankees baseball cap, noted that baseball’s World Series used to coincide with colder weather, like the Yankees’ memorable Game 6 win in 1977, which the Covintrees attended.
“When Reggie Jackson hit his home run, look at pictures — back then, everybody was bundled up,” he said.
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