What is an “Indian Summer”, and why is it so-named?
A. (this quoted directly from the Meteorological Glossary, HMSO): ” A warm, calm spell of weather occurring in the autumn, especially in October and November. The earliest record of the use of this term is at the end of the 18th century, in America, and it was introduced into the British Isles at the beginning of the nineteenth century. There is no statistical evidence to show that such a warm spell tends to recur each year. ” C.E.P. Brooks, in his ‘Climate in everyday life’, notes that it is the counterpart of our ‘Old Wives Summer’, here in Europe, and tends to follow the first severe frost and to persist for several days. It is thought that the phrase was coined by european settlers on the Atlantic coast of North America. Paul Marriott, in his ‘Red Sky at Night, Shepherd’s Delight’, says…” strictly an Indian Summer is a lengthy dry sunny spell from late September into November. The name probably derived from the N. American Indians who relied on a similar fine spell in late autumn
