I have no doubts that I welcome fall more than most readers because I live south of all but a few of you in the States. The days of Crematoria are thankfully gone for another 10 months and that's time for celebration.
The odd part is that depending on where you look, you'll get as many as three different dates for the start of fall. At some point in the year, something I downloaded put Sept. 22 in my phone as the equinox. Generally speaking, over my life to date, the start of fall was often Sept. 21. Today, I get this (from Firefox and the Duck Duck Go browser):
As it pretty clearly explains in the Search Assist box, it's actually Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 0005 UTC. That works out to be Tuesday evening, Sept. 22, at 8:05 PM EDT. It turned to fall in UTC before I wrote this paragraph.
The word "Equinox" literally means "equal night" or that the night and day are the same length. I can't find a place where that works. The Weather Channel's explanation is that the calculations are based on the center of the sun and the times don't always reconcile. The time of sunrise and sunset vary with longitude at any given latitude, and they don't work out to be the same minute on my "Sunrise/Sunset" app on the phone until Sunday the 27th - both at 7:13.
You can drive yourself nuts looking for those details with what's generally available to us.
Note that it's the start of Fall only in the northern hemisphere and the start of Spring in the southern hemisphere (someone in the southern hemisphere, correct me if you use the same words we use and have the backward effects - like fall is the season leading into summer not winter). Our nights will get longer and the days shorter until the winter solstice in mid-December, then days get longer and the nights get shorter until the summer solstice. On the spring equinox, the equal day/night story repeats.
Our local news had a headline saying we're getting the first cold front of the season on the weekend, but Weather Underground (motto "Approximately Right Approximately 80% of the time") says our high drops from 87 today to 83 by the weekend while the low drops from 76 to 71. I remember the other day getting a laugh over the forecast low was going to be 72 on the 27th - just because of the mirror symmetry of the numbers. What lends WU credence in my opinion, though, is they show winds out of the north at over 15 mph for a couple of days and that's a sign of a cold front.
From NZ here, we are aware you use fall from ubiquitous media but it's always been Autumn in the vernacular, and your reverse sequence was a laugh, never heard that one before but i guess it goes with the expectation that everything here is upside down, cheers, Norm.
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