A Winter's Day

Correction: The reference to the daily high below (which did hold at 51°) should have said that it was within one degree of the record low maximum for the date. The fact checkers at PM Update have been suitably admonished to stay off the fried Coke.

Now

Cold, windy. It's "a winter's day in a deep and dark . . ." October? Returning from a weekend visit to the pig races and fried everything (including Coke) at the N.C. State Fair, PM Update finds that someone left the freezer door open.

Assisted by a northwesterly wind gusting over 30 mph, temperatures in the Nation's Capital region are struggling to reach the low 50s this afternoon, and the wind makes it feel much colder. The high hourly reading at National of 51° at 2pm, if it holds for the day (It's been back to 50° through 5pm), would be the average high for Dec. 2-4, and it misses the record low minimum for the date in 77 years of records by only 1°. The last time the daily high was below 55° was March 26.

CapitalWeather.com chart from NWS data, photo © Kevin Ambrose

Tonight and Tomorrow

Continued cold, breezy. Winds should die down somewhat tonight, but not enough to push lows below the mid to upper 30s in most places. Tomorrow will be partly cloudy and breezy, but not as windy as today, with highs around 54°.

For the outlook through the rest of the week, scroll down to Jason's post below.

Climate Corner: "Would You Like Information with Your Data and Fries?"

If you've ever done any searching in an unfamiliar subject area in the virtual haystack known as the web, you know it's often very hard to separate the golden from the garbage. RealClimate.org, the climate site run by climate scientists, announced today that they are participating in a new service by Google Co-op which allows searches to be performed using only sites which have been selected to meet some level of quality. So, if you'd rather get your climate change information from scientists instead of paid political propagandists, fiction writers, the oil industry, or Homer Simpson, try out their new search facility.