Well, Daylight Saving Time arrived Saturday, riding on a hard, cold, northwest blow.  About mid-afternoon a wall of wind hit bringing with it plummeting temperatures and a smattering of rain, stinging sleet and a few snowflakes. 

Yep, I was outside at the time.  I’d been loading some old weeds from the gardens onto the pick-up truck to haul away.  It had been cloudy most of the day, but calm, making the 50ish temperatures tolerable.  There had been low thick grey clouds present all day.  As such, I kept an eye on the sky to west as this is where our weather comes from.  I’d been watching the clouds become more broken, with occasional shafts of sunlight streaming down in the distance.  The shafts began to move ever more rapidly and disappeared and reformed frequently, sometimes highlighting a pasture with grazing Holsteins , sometimes spotlighting a house or barn then sweeping over the large wooded hill just west of the house.  They were always moving in our direction. 

A breeze out of the southwest had been slowly picking up throughout the early afternoon.  This along with the distant erratic dancing shafts of light emerging from angry looking clouds told me I should expect a sudden change in weather.  I’d had this expectation drilled into me time and again by my past wildfire training and experience.  This is the kind of a day a forest firefighter dreads when he’s got a going fire.  The weather was about to change.  It would be sudden, and it would not be pleasant.

A “spring” cold front was approaching.  In front of the system, there is a relatively stable atmosphere characterized by low, layered clouds and relatively still air.  As the front approaches from the west, a steadily increasing south west breeze picks up running parallel to the line of the front.  The closer the front gets, the stronger the breeze gets.  Our breeze had been picking up steam since lunchtime.  By two thirty or so I knew the arrival of the front was imminent . 

I wasn’t disappointed by what happened about 10 or 15 minutes later.  WHAM!  The wall of wind hit.  A very quick swing out of the northwest it came…..with a fury.  First came the pelting, nearly horizontal precipitation.  The winds blustered to 30 or 40 miles an hour and in the next 5 minutes the temperature plummeted about 10 degrees F.  I tried to pack down what I had loaded on the truck to that point, gathered the tools quickly and threw them on top and dove into the cab.  Even though the squall ended quickly, the winds continued and the temps continued to fall rapidly.  My outdoor activity for the afternoon was done.

Perhaps it was fitting that the last day before DST began with a “Spring Front”.  As a firefighter I always wanted to know when one of these fast moving, powerful fronts was on its way.  The expectation of one dictated firefighting planning and tactics.  One thing they did signal was that spring was not too far distant.  There may be another “spring front” or two yet, but the atmosphere is in flux and spring will arrive soon enough.