kgottwald

Yesterday's forecast of partly sunny and 70 was a particularly bad bust, since temps actually *fell* throughout the day, into the mid-50s.

I hate cutoff lows. Day after day after dreary day of showers. This will put paid to any hope of a dry month.

It isn't warming up at all. Will the warm front stay to our south?

Why doesn't the NWS ever put up a Wedge Advisory to alert us that their optimistic temp/sunshine forecast has a 90% chance of not verifying?? I thought I was going to be able to eat outside today.

The forecast low last night was 37 and I assumed it would be cooling off quickly after sunset so I closed the windows and turned the heat on. But I still felt kind of chilly - because the heat wasn't coming on hardly at all - because the temperature stayed in the mid-fifties throughout most of the night! This kind of situation, the models are really incompetent at dealing with. There's always an assumption of a quick cooldown, which leads me to shut the windows when, had I known better, I could have kept them open.

80 degrees! Heh.

Twenty minutes of snow in Tysons Corner and it's already changed to sleet. The snow gods curse NoVa again!!

I wonder what housing prices are like on the Tug Hill Plateau.

February 1986 had three snow events on the 22nd, 24th and 26-7th: 3.6, 3.6 and 1.8 inches respectively at DCA.

Or a Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. I wonder what the climate around here was like in 20,000 BC when the glaciers reached to Central PA.

I was. Historic amounts were predicted and in Vienna/Tysons we got six inches . . and then drizzle. Edit: I seem to remember predictions that it might equal or surpass 2/11/83.

But we're also probably going to go two whole winters without a single sub-freezing high at DCA.

2018, the year of the atmospheric river

My biggest disappointment was Christmas Day 1985 - all the TV mets were POSITIVE that we were going to have a white Christmas! 2 to 4 inches was predicted even though Christmas Eve had been 58 and sunny. What actually happened was several hours of sleet and enough overnight snow that, if you squinted really hard, there was some white in the cracks on the sidewalk. A Post article the next day claimed the "cold air stalled over the Appalachians". Whatever primitive Neanderthal forecast models they were using back then were nowhere near up to the challenge but Gordon Barnes and Bob Ryan were just treating the outputs as gospel and basically wishcasting.

The forecasts for that storm were so horrendously bad that I stopped paying attention to the forecasts for the rest of that winter; apparently there was another major forecast bust at the beginning of March 2001 that I fortunately missed

Remember December 30, 2000? DC was supposed to get 4 - 8 inches from that storm. We got CLEAR SKIES, while Northwestern NJ got bombed with 25 inches. Here in Vienna, VA, the moderate snow stopped around 9 a.m., and it's been nothing but light or very light snow since.

I was pretty sure yesterday morning that DCA would end up with only a trace - it always, always underperforms in snow events. Just 16" in the 2016 storm when everywhere else in the immediate area was two feet or greater. I wonder if the location only got 16 inches during the Knickerbocker storm that dumped 28 inches at 24th & M.

Just changed to sleet a couple minutes ago in Tysons Corner.

https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/timeseries.php?sid=Kiad&num=168&wfo=psr Switching to five-minute observations hasn't worked in days. And composite reflectivity no longer works on the NWS radar. Is NWS running out of funding to maintain these or something?

Remember 1997-98? So warm that there weren't even any snow threats in the DC area.