Is It Officially Fall, Or Can We Expect Oklahoma’s Second Summer?

It seems that even the highest level meteorologists are celebrating the arrival of fall this week, but our collective experience might suggest it could be a little early to make that call just yet.

If you were here in Southwest Oklahoma in 2015, try to remember what fall looked like that year. We were five years into a terrible and devastating drought and there wasn't any reprieve in sight. It was July and August hot all the way to Halloween that year. I only remember this through the memories thing on social media, but it's a good reminder of just how bad a bad year can be.

You know what else happened in 2015? Everyone celebrated as a big cold front swept into our region cutting those hundred-degree days down into the 80's, and everyone just assumed that was the arrival of fall. We were all wrong.

Those reasonably mild days lasted some seven or eight days, but eventually, the temperature crept back up into the upper 90's and lingered for another few weeks. We literally had a second summer in Southwest Oklahoma.

If you can remember even further back than that, the same thing happened in 2011. It was the hottest season on record since 1895 and when coupled with a lack of rain, we made national headlines as the refuge caught fire and consumed some 30,000 acres of land and homes.

I realize we're getting a reprieve from the dry weather, most of Comanche County will fall off or nearly off the drought map after these last few days... but that doesn't mean we're in the clear just yet.

So what do you think? Are we in fall, or are we just entering the second summer?