Marching Back

A vigorous batch of upper-air energy, reflected at the surface as a weak low-pressure trough, rattled through the Washington DC metro area this morning. It brought liquid and frozen showers, and even the rumble of thunder, to many locations along with gusty winds. The northwesterly breeze, gusting over 35 mph at times, is reinforcing the cold air over the region; temperatures were barely making it into the low 50s at mid afternoon, about 10° below the long-term average for the date. It's also very dry; dewpoints are near 20° in most places. (Ft. Belvoir is still, undoubtedly bogusly, reporting at least 10° below everyone else.)

Surface weather map at 8am this morning from HPC/NCEP/NWS

Tonight and Tomorrow

Under scattered to broken clouds, temperatures tonight will fall to the upper 30s city to the lower 30s in the colder 'burbs. Tomorrow will see mainly sunny skies and temperatures rebounding to a more seasonable range, with highs around 64.

Tropical Topics: Gray Outlook

There are 57 days to the official start of hurricane season, and the land-locked folks at Colorado State's Tropical Meteorology Project have issued their updated hurricane season forecast. They have reiterated the numbers from the December outlook: 17 named storms with 9 hurricanes, 5 of them severe. Probability of a severe hurricane landfall along the east coast (including east and west coast of Florida) is given as 64%. The forecast also includes their opinion (highly negative) of the relationship between global warming and hurricane intensity.

Omnimedia

If you've been spending more time lately with localized and personalized web sites such as CapitalWeather.com rather than the big Internet names, you're in good company. Yesterday's WaPo reports on a traffic analysis which shows that growth is "is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information."

Speaking of our friends at WaPo, if you think they've been getting bashed here for their climate coverage, check out what the professional climate scientists have to say about the WaPo publishing global warming bashing columns on consecutive days by those distinguished climate scientists (and notorious sources of hot air) George Will and Robert Novak. For the antidote to Will and Novak, see yesterday's editorial cartoon, excerpted above, by Tom Toles.