The middle of a continent is subject to weather extremes. Here in Wisconsin we had robins, crocuses, and first butterflies last week, then a snowstorm dumping 10" snow overnight, now expecting 70-degree temps next weekend. I'm looking forward to getting out of my own "tiny box" when all this gets sorted out.
You're having the same weather as we in DC! Except we're a few degrees warmer so we got rain instead of snow.
ReplyDeleteMy observation is that DC does not really have spring. There's just a few weeks where the weather doesn't know if it's winter or summer. It can change on a daily basis from morning to night and back the next day.
Last week, we had a day with 70 in the morning and (a bit) of snow at night - and it stuck overnight! Two days later, nice 50s again. And on Monday, half the city shut down due to a front coming through that dropped the temperature to around freezing and came with a whole lot of heavy rain that could have been some mix of freezing rain, snow, and sleet if had just been a few degrees colder. It did freeze overnight.
[The fact that DC gets a lot of precipitation around freezing explains why winters here cause so much upheaval. It's very hard to prepare for. Much better to get a foot of snow than half a foot of snow and an inch of ice. And if it starts by raining, then all your road prep just washes away.
Also, they simply do not prepare much anyway.]
These swinging temperatures happen every year, but rarely as wild as this year. Usually it's swings of 10 or 20 degrees. Who cares in Spring if it's 45 or 55? Everything is nice! But now we're swinging from 70 to 30 and back. It's impossible to dress for.
I suspect that even though you get large swings in weather, the overall median temp must get dampened by the effect of the nearby ocean, slightly cooling in summer and warming in winter.
DeleteI expect you are waiting for this -
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-cherry-blossoms-of-washington-dc.html