First snowfall of the season

We went just over 238 days and 20 hours between freezing temperatures at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, from March 27th until the wee hours of this morning. That's quite a long time for Chicago. And in fact, our snowfall this morning was the latest first snow since 2015.

Here's my roof deck after about an hour of snow, around 9:40 am:

And just three hours later, when taking Cassie around the block, with the snow already deeper than 80 mm:

This vignette interested me because of all the maple leaves. I posted a photo of a gingko tree in the local park last weekend. Lots of the area's gingko and maple trees have held onto their leaves, in some cases without even pulling in all the chlorophyll yet. So here we are just an hour into a pretty mild snow event with the temperature hovering just around freezing, and this particular maple decided to peace out for the winter.

I think the trees were just waiting for a freeze, even one that only got down to -0.3°C and lasted less than two hours. I expect we'll see the maples and gingkoes shake the rest of their foliage off in the next day or so. And yet, the forecast has us above freezing consistently from now until Monday evening, even hitting 11°C on Sunday.

Early winter weather is always weird in Chicago. This year is no different.