WVclimo

Spent much of the day hiking in Shenandoah National Park. From Thornton Gap entrance to Big Meadows was socked in with fog reducing visibilty to near zero at times, a steady mist/drizzle and 57°

Planted everything on Saturday. Had enough rain on Sunday to wet the ground but very little since. Wish the wedge would ease a little as there are good showers just off to my W/SW that the seeds could use.

Showers around this morning and 59 degrees. Rare to hit on a 20% POP.

Warm muggy night in rural WV with neighborhood fireworks going off from several directions. Guess it’s the pre-Memorial Day weekend celebration ? Actually it will be every weekend from now through the summer. Not sure the stands are open so these must be from surplus stock ?

Still 80 here at the 8:53 p.m. ob, after a high of 85. Had to put on the AC. Looking forward to a week of 60’s/ 70’s and soaking rain.

Laying in all the vegetables this weekend. Late start this year, but it worked out with all the freezing weather in May so far. Haven't grown potatoes in a few years, but we recovered a large (50'x8') raised bed that we had let grow over and added some additional soil and peat last weekend. Should yield a fair amount of Yukon golds if the bugs leave us alone. Two other 50'x50' patches are turned and have trenches dug ready to plant beans and onions, and hills mounded for squash, cukes, melons, cantaloupes. Tomatoes and peppers doing well in the cold house. Hoping the soil warms soon, as we are putting them in the ground Saturday as well. All the lettuces and herbs being grown in trays and pots/ buckets this year.

A frosty 28 degrees here this morning.

Looks like MRB tied the record for the coldest high temperature for any day in the month of May. Previous dates with a high of 48: 5/1/1963 5/3/1945 5/6/1958 On May 12, 2008 MRB had a high of 49, the latest sub-50 high on record.

48 for a high here. Looks like the same at MRB which breaks the record for the date by 3 degrees. One of the colder days I have ever spent on the lawn tractor with wind chills in the 30’s and wind gusts consistently 35-40 mph.

Flurries blowing around on a gusty wind. 43 degrees

31.9 for my low.

Soaking rain here now at 49 degrees. The airport hit 53 earlier this afternoon, missing today's low max record by 2 degrees. My high was 51.

Going forecast would threaten both low max and low min readings for this area for Saturday. Records for both at MRB are from 1947 with a high of 51 and a low of 28

Briefly fell to 33 degrees overnight before rising before dawn. Had a thin coating of ice on the windshield this morning. Freeze watch out for tomorrow night.

I don’t recall anything from those years, though I know we had a snowfall in 1994 around the 18th of March and then Spring finally arrived with 80° temperatures a few days later. Here is March 1990 at BWI with the very early heat wave from 3/12-16 followed by accumulating snow on the 20th, 24th and 25th.

I saw it go the other way in March 1990. There were three days of temps in the upper 80’s followed by a dump of wet snow a couple of days later. I was in Rockville and the snow accumulated on grass, trees and car tops during the day.

I saw a coating of snow in the high elevations of Garrett County in late May in 1975. The previous day was warm, but thunderstorms and hail moved in late in the afternoon followed by sharply colder temps overnight. I was in 6th grade, staying in a cabin for what was then referred to as "outdoor school," when we spent a week at a camp. No heat in the cabins and none of us had prepared for freezing temps.

The past 10 days or so, the number of tests has been significantly higher than before. But in the US it looks we are still testing, on average, about 250,000 people a day in that time. Overall, about 1 in 6 of all the tests performed since Day 1 has resulted in a confirmed case. To achieve 200,000 new cases a day, we may need to test 1,200,000 a day to locate them. That seems a long way from where we are now, but I hope we can expand our testing capability that rapidly.

The startling part of that NY Times article to me was this: The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now. Are we expected to even have this level of testing capability a month from now ?

Have been hoping to hear this. Good news.

1.25" from yesterday's event puts me at 6.04" for April.

CONSAll is a blend of all available deterministic models and guidance.

Over a half inch in the bucket so far. Chilly rain at 45 degrees.

Virginia now with the fewest tests per million people of any state, according to the worldometers.info site.

After running more than 6 degrees above normal through Jan-Feb-Mar, MRB is -1.1 for April. Only two 70 degree days so far this month, versus the 5 we had in March.