The New Hotness

The soil temperature near the base of the bird box, under a few inches of chipped leaf mulch, shows the expected trend for the growing season, but there’s a weird bump in mid-October:

The NWS temperature summary confirms the anomaly, with the DEP column giving the departure from the historic average:

DY MAX MIN AVG DEP
==================
 1  65  58  62   5
 2  72  58  65   9
 3  73  49  61   5
 4  65  51  58   2
 5  62  40  51  -4
 6  70  38  54  -1
 7  76  52  64  10
 8  74  52  63   9
 9  70  44  57   4
10  63  37  50  -3
11  56  44  50  -3
12  63  35  49  -3
13  63  37  50  -2
14  78  59  69  17
15  79  69  74  23
16  72  53  63  12
17  73  52  63  13
18  68  50  59   9
19  56  33  45  -5
20  61  30  46  -4
21  57  48  53   4
22  53  50  52   3
23  52  48  50   2
24  59  41  50   2
25  66  34  50   2
26  58  43  51   3
27  64  38  51   4
28  73  38  56   9
29  68  42  55   8

The precipitation record shows over an inch of rain in those four days, so that weather probably blew in from the south.