National Treasure

Now

Sunny, mild. After lows in the low 40s, it's a bright, crisp spring day, perfect for filming the sequel to National Treasure here in the Nation's Capital. By mid afternoon, temperatures had reached the low 60s in much of the region with very low humidities (dewpoints in the teens or even single digits). Showers associated with a cold front are scattered from southwestern Virginia southeastward across the Carolinas. The fine weather is likely to persist through at least part of the weekend.

Photo: The national treasure cherry blossoms coming out near the Washington Monument, by CapitalWeather.com photographer Kevin Ambrose

Tonight and Tomorrow

Clear, chilly, then milder. With clear skies, light winds and low humidities, lows tonight will be crispy, in the mid to upper 30s in the city to the upper 20s in the coolest 'burblands. Tomorrow will be sunny and a little warmer, highs in the upper 60s.

For the outlook through the weekend and beyond with Larson's Long-Range, scroll down to Josh's post below.

Hype Casting

Not such a treasure is AccuWeather's early hurricane season outlook on steroids, which gets taken apart by the HoChro's astute SciGuy in a post on Tuesday. (Pointer and interesting comments at University of Colorado's Prometheus science policy blog.)

What's so unfortunate about this kind of exaggeration is that it adds to public confusion and skepticism about the real capabilities of the science. It undermines confidence in all time scales of forecasting, from daily weather to seasonal and long-term climate trends (which are all very different types of problems, BTW, despite what you might hear on squawk radio, the cable noise networks, or the pollution-industry-financed blogs).