Anchorage Daily News

Bright orange and gold leaves are beginning to carpet fading lawns. The bands of snow capping the Chugach Mountains grow thicker whenever the range is hidden in mist.

It's been obvious for a while, but now it's official: Fall is here.

And almost as if to mark the first day of fall, the season's first frost was expected to blanket parts of Anchorage and the Mat-Su this morning. In a weather advisory released Sunday, the National Weather Service predicts dry conditions moving into place overnight were likely to linger, meaning areas that escape Jack Frost today could see it Tuesday morning.

With the frost will likely come a break in the seemingly endless weeks of clouds and rain that have recently plagued Southcentral, the service said.

That's because an area of low pressure was to begin moving into Prince William Sound and then the Gulf of Alaska, taking with it the clouds and dreary weather that were pinned in place.

A gradual reduction in cloud cover should result, though the weather service cautioned that there was some uncertainty as to how much clearing would take place right away. There will be "at least a few breaks in the clouds," the weather service said.

The areas that clear up are the ones that will likely see frost. The average date for the first frost of the season -- the date at which the low temperature first dips below 32 degrees -- is Sept. 18, according to the service.

The earliest it happened, according to the record books, was in 1946, when freezing temperatures hit Aug. 14. The latest was in 1969, when the first frost struck Oct. 16.

The frost and fall mark the end of an unusually cool and wet summer for Anchorage -- one that saw only 17 days with above-average temperatures.

According to the weather service, "That means that only 18 percent of days this summer were warmer than normal, 5 percent of the days were considered normal and an astonishing 77 percent of the days were cooler than normal."

Find James Halpin online at adn.com/contact/jhalpin or call him at 257-4589.

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