Friday, January 1, 2010

DC Super Saturday "Blizzard" Accompanied Coldest December . . .
Since 2005

For related and more recent posts, see:
Washington DC's historic, record-breaking snowstorm in December set off a predictable flurry of "Where's global warming now?" snark in the deniosphere, but the final temperature figures from the month show a very different picture: Heavy snow is frequently uncorrelated with temperatures. The December 2009 average temperature of 37.9° was all of 1.6° below the long-term average. This made it the coldest December in the Nation's Capital since it was 36.4° in 2005. The month was one of five Decembers of the decade to be colder than average, but well above the 31.8° in 2000. For the decade overall, December averaged just 0.07° below normal.

Stay tuned next week for more analysis and charts of the monthly, yearly, and decade temperatures.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. Great stuff. Keep the stats/analysis coming.
-joe in arlington

CapitalClimate said...

Thank you for your interest. Feel free to post a question if you have any concerns that you don't see covered.

S.P. Gass said...

Thanks for the stats. I read on Accuweather that Bluefield, WV set a record low high (low max) temp on Monday. Do you know if there were any other records closer to DC?

CapitalClimate said...

Low max records were set on Saturday at:
Blacksburg 18
Danville 32 (tie)
Bluefield 16
on Sunday at:
Blacksburg 20
on Monday at:
Bluefield 17
These are the only records announced by the NWS in the Virginia/DC/Maryland region.

FWIW, the POR (period of record) at Blacksburg is only back to 1952, Danville is 1948, and Bluefield is 1959. By comparison, DC's low max records for the first week of January were all set in 1918 (twice) or in the 1800s. The 26 at Dulles on the 3rd was 3° above the record in 1979.

S.P. Gass said...

Thanks a lot!

Are you a man or a computer?

:-)

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