A day later each decade

 

Our data shows that peak fall foliage is getting a day later each decade (Outside Magazine)

Outside Mag article "Leaf-Peeing Looks Different This Year" by Megan Michelson

In 1938, Wilfred Dexter and his wife, Polly, opened Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. In those early days, during the Great Depression, Polly began charting the weather daily, as well as attendance at the restaurant. She recorded temperatures and snowfall, and in autumn, she indicated the week when fall foliage was at its peak. As was the case then and even today: leaf-peeping season always resulted in an uptick in business.

Eventually, Polly and Will’s daughter, Nancy, took over the restaurant and continued her mother’s tradition of recording the weather and the fall foliage. These days, Nancy’s daughter, Kathie Côté, runs it alongside her husband. Kathie still keeps diligent, hand-written records on graph paper of the climate and fall colors and the impact on their day-to-day number of day-to-day customers. (Kathie’s daughter, Emily, has finally started putting the data online.)

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Today those stacks of clipboards and binders of penciled-in spreadsheets remain one of the longest-standing records of peak season in New England. And scientists are turning to this data as part of continued study into how climate change is impacting its timing and quality.

“We’re looking at historical documents starting in the 1950s. Our data shows that peak fall foliage is getting a day later each decade,” says Stephanie Spera, assistant professor of physical geography and environment at the University of Richmond in Virginia, who’s in the midst of a research project on how climate change will impact fall foliage in Maine’s Acadia National Park. (Spera is using the data from Polly’s notes as part of her study.) “In the fifties, peak foliage was the first weekend of October, and now it is a week later, around the 12th or 13th of October, depending on where you are.”