When autumn feels like summer
After a wet and cold September, we’ve experienced an incredibly warm mid-October. For this ‘short-post’ week I decided to put my camera right next to a cycle path in ’s-Hertogenbosch last Saturday and to simply record some random people cycling past.
Mid-October, the leaves have turned brown and some have fallen already, but the summer shorts can still be worn.
This is the time of year that quite a lot of people struggle to decide what to wear. You see people in shorts right next to people in wool scarves and winter coats. With temperatures reaching 23 degrees Celsius* the ones in shorts seem to have had the better outfit, at least during the day.
While some took off their jackets like this man and put it over the handlebars, this woman wears her wool scarf. This type of weather, so late in the year, is confusing.
That it really is autumn is clear from the brown leaves on the trees and already on the edges of the cycle path. The long shadows and the typical end-of-the-year light are also a dead giveaway that summer is indeed over. Of course, in the Netherlands that doesn’t mean the cycling season is coming to an end. The Dutch cycle on all through the wet autumn days that I’m sure we’ll also get and through winter as well. But we’re not there quite yet. First, we thoroughly enjoyed our beautiful sunny and exceptionally warm autumn days.
Enjoy the video!
Cycling in October can look like this.
The average temperature for October is 10.7C, so 23C is more than double that. This warm weather was caused by hurricane Ophelia. It would never reach this country, but while it was on its way to Ireland it was pushing hot air from Spain directly over The Netherlands. Little did we know, last weekend, how Ireland would suffer from this now ex-hurricane on Monday.
10 comments on “When autumn feels like summer”
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BicycleDutch by Mark Wagenbuur is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
We are having the same beautiful weather here in Southern Ontario. Today is forecast to be sunny with a high of 21 degrees. Saturday and Sunday are forecast to be sunny with daily highs of 22 degrees.
I am telling my children, “Get outside and enjoy the weather. This may be the best weekend for the rest of the year!”
When it’s 10C out and dry is it possible to enjoy bicycling for a few hours with tennis shoes? Or would closed boots be better?
I agree with all the previous posters.
Still, this post and comment is way better than no post or comment at all.
Continue and, steady as it goes Mark !
That the temperature reads at double the average temperature for the month…what a nit-picky thing to comment on.
oh, no! Bicycle Dutch leading the way with fake news 🙂
i’m with you it’s double – hooray! for celsius
Apparently you located a wormhole (near the shadow patch on the cycle path) from which all the time new cyclists appear… One wonders where they come from! 🙂
An enjoyable post as usual, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make sense to say “23C is more than double [10.7C]”. Try converting these temperatures to Fahrenheit and see what the relationship is or consider what you would say if the lower temperature were zero or sub-zero.
I just meant that the average temperature is 10.7C. If you double that it would be 21.4C and we had 23C. So that is more than twice as hot. You couldn’t say that in Fahrenheit, that’s true, because then 51.26F is the average temperature and we experienced 73.4F. But the vast majority of the world measures in Celsius, so for them it’s true and quite clear, I would think.
I think it was clear what you were trying to say, but the point is that 23°C is not “twice as hot” as 10.7°C, whatever scale you use. 10.7°C is 283.9 K, so twice as hot would be 567.7 K or 294.6°C.
It’s true that the number 23 is about twice 10.7, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can’t just ignore the unit when doing arithmetic with measurements. As Alasdair points out, what would you have said if the average temperature was 1°C? That this day was 23 times as hot as the average? You can’t use shifted scales such as Celsius and Fahrenheit to compute ratios.
It would be true to say that 23°C is more than twelve degrees hotter than the average of 10.7°C, and that sounds just as impressive IMHO.
Just to avoid any confusion use the Kelvin scale 🙂