Spring Pops Up; Winter Attempting to Rally

*Wind Advisory in Effect Through 10am Friday*

Now

Windy, turning colder. Some light showers (0.01") and even the sound of thunder in some places ushered in winds gusting over 40 mph at times as a cold front south of an energetic clipper system moved briskly eastward through the Washington metro area today. Temperatures, however, again exceeded expectations, popping up to the nearly spring-like upper 50s before they began to drop around mid afternoon. Highs were 59° at National, 56° at Dulles, 55° at BWI. To the south, Charlottesville and Richmond were both in the low 60s.

Winter will be attempting to stage a comeback in the next couple of days as below-average temperatures return along with a marginal possibility of some more winter-like precipitation on Sunday.

Surface weather map at 1pm today from HPC/NCEP/NWS

Tonight and Tomorrow

Clearing, windy, colder. Lows tonight under clearing skies will be in the upper 20s to near 30°. Tomorrow will be mostly sunny and breezy with highs only in the low 40s.

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

Winter Thunder

The 30-year climatological average is 1 February thunderstorm every 5 years in Washington, but thunder has now been observed in 2 consecutive Februarys and in 3 out of the last 5. The previous occurrence to last year was in 2003.

Mediaorology: Channel 4 Sweeps V-Day Storm Coverage

Yesterday's WaTi business section had an article, "TV news makes hay out of snow" about the local news ratings during the Valentine's Day storm and the implications of the weather coverage for the all-important February "sweeps" period. The corrected rankings in today's dcrtv blog show WRC-4 in first place for all 3 time slots (6am, 5pm, 11pm), followed by WJLA-7 at 6am and 5pm; WTTG-5 was second at 11pm. WUSA-9 was last at 6am and 11pm and 3rd at 5pm. WRC's score was at least 50% above the last-place station in each set of ratings; it was over 4 times the last-place WUSA-9 at 11pm.

CapitalWeather.com chart from Washington Times data via dcrtv.com, photo © Kevin Ambrose