I say (N. Hemisphere) Fall starts ...
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1 Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec season starts make more sense (Score:5, Informative)
The seasons here (Australia) start on 1 Mar/1 Jun/1 Sep/1 Dec, rather than being based on the solstices and equinoxes as they are in the US. Using those dates is:
a) easier to remember; and
b) better matches the actual temperatures (this is true in the northern hemisphere as well)
To clarify what I mean by (b), you will note that in most non-tropical areas of the world, the long-term average temperature minima and maxima fall on or around 15 Jan and 15 Jul each year and do a bell curvish kinda thing before and after that. Hence seasons that run from 1 Dec-28 Feb and 1 Jun-31 Aug make sense because they are straddling the coldest and hottest parts of the year almost exactly. It means that 'winter' genuinely is, on average, the coldest three month period, with the coldest part of all falling in the middle of that period.
The reason the solstices aren't a good date on which to start seasons (at least from a weather perspective) is because temperature changes 'lag behind' the change in the sunlight. So in the northern hemisphere, although the shortest day is on or around 21 December, the lowest (average) temperature is experienced around the middle of January (over the whole hemisphere - there will obviously be local variations). If we used 21 Dec as the start of winter as they do in the US, that'd mean the coldest period of winter wasn't the middle of winter, but rather the period about 3 weeks into it (i.e. towards the start of winter).
Indeed, the US NWS/NOAA themselves uses the 1 Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec seasons, referring to them as 'meteorological seasons', for exactly this reason. I think it's a better system, at least in terms of thinking of seasons as 'changes in the weather' rather than celestially-based things.