It is commonly said that the first fall season freeze occurs during a full moon in late September or October. The featured plot shows that this simply is not the case in Iowa. The horizontal axis contains the number of days from the nearest full moon and the vertical axis is the number of days that observation was from the 6th of October (the median first freeze date). The contours indicate the relative frequency of the data. The important portion of the plot is the histogram in red at the top of the page clearly showing no full moon date dependence. Here is an Excel file with this data.

Voting:
Good = 20
Bad = 7

Tags:   climate   moon   freeze  

The authoritative source of knowledge, wikipedia, says that the Harvest Moon is the full moon closest in time to the fall equinox (beginning of fall). The authoritative source of weather forecasting, the Farmer's Almanac, notes that the Harvest Moon helps farmers harvest at night and lets then know that their crops are mature. Regardless, it was a very pretty moon rise last night.

Voting:
Good = 18
Bad = 3

Tags:   moon