kgottwald

Getting really tired of having to carry my umbrella every damn day. Hoping for a region-wide drought

That Canadian air better not be a fata morgana. I am so over this damned humidity and the rain every damn day.

Walking to work this morning, it felt like there was a waterlogged, moldy blanket wrapped around me from head to toe. Seriously unpleasant. Also, on some of the grassy areas between office building parking lots and the sidewalk, the in-ground sprinklers are still set to go off every morning at 5, no matter how much rain has fallen recently (also spraying the sidewalk rendering it temporarily unusable). What's the point of that except to deliberately waste water and provide breeding grounds for mosquitoes?

There are always alarmist stories but never any closure. I remember back in 1982 reading in the Fairfax Journal (remember that paper?) about a rabies epidemic with sick raccoons being found every day. There were occasional mentions of more rabid raccoons off and on for a while, then it vanished from the news. For all I know that epidemic is still going on!

Typical summer days in the 70s and early 80s had so much haze you couldn't even see the sun; the sky was a milky white. When thunderstorms were approaching, you couldn't see the clouds either, the haze just gradually darkened. August of 1988 was the first time I can remember the DC area having blue sky and cumulus clouds on a hot, muggy day. Topper Shutt on Channel 9 even mentioned how unusual it was, said it reminded him of the Caribbean.

During the weeks of perfect weather (and 10-hour workdays) I just knew in my heart that this pattern was never, *never* going to last through the holidays. Not being blessed with a location west of the Rockies, we just have to resign ourselves to rain ruining more than half of our summer holiday weekends. I fully expect July 4 to feature either an all-day rain like 2004, or severe thunderstorms ruining the fireworks.

Temperature continued rising until past 2 a.m. this morning (70 at IAD at 2:10 a.m.!!) I don't recall that being in any of the forecasts. If I'd known that was going to happen I'd have turned the furnace off and opened the windows!

Another consequence of the increased rainfall in recent years; higher soil moisture means higher dewpoints and more clouds bubbling up, which cuts the heat.

Last Sunday was my ideal weather: mid-eighties and low dewpoints. But that never, ever lasts more than a day and we're lucky if we get one day like that per month in the summer. Every year I keep hoping for a dry pattern like 1964 (only three days with measurable rain in May that year, and every summer month had less than two inches of rain) and every year we keep getting stuck in nasty, wet patterns. REALLY frigging depressing to think the climate has changed so much that never again in my lifetime will I see another nice, dry summer.

Oh, there's been plenty of rain in Tysons Corner/Vienna. I walk to work every day, four miles each way, and both yesterday morning and this morning I got rained on (the latter being a surprise). Just got home after coming through a wind-driven downpour which turned the sidewalks into rivers and thoroughly soaked my pants and socks. Just once, can't we get a DRY summer for a change?? A good old-fashioned drought like in 1930 or 1965??

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