 |
| Photo by Mary Hollinger, NOAA photo library |
by Peggy Robin
On Monday, January 11, DC’s Snow
Team went into full alert sending this snowstorm preparedness press release in advance of Tuesday
evening’s predicted snow sprinkles -- http://1.usa.gov/1n2ME5u -- making me wonder if anyone at DPW bothers
to read the forecasts put out by meteorologist Jason Samenow of the
Washington’s Post’s mostly-on-target Capital Weather Gang. On that same Monday
morning, Jason called it just right: “Some mood snowflakes may swirl
through the air late Tuesday afternoon in D.C. area; These flakes are likely to
have little impact on the region.” [http://wapo.st/1ZruhDE]
On the other hand, Jason was caught off-guard by the sudden
darkening of the skies and downpour on Sunday afternoon (1-10-16). But, as if
in compensation, we were all rewarded afterward with some lovely, color-intense
rainbows, including some double and even triple ones, posted by Capital Weather
Gang fans/photographers:
This weird winter weather week (4 W’s –
how’s that for alliteration?) began with a 63 degree day on Sunday afternoon,
January 10…. and the following morning, we woke up to 27 degrees F – a drop of
36 degrees in less than 18 hours. That change led me to rummage around Google
for a while to see if I could discover whether the overnight shift from balmy,
spring-like conditions to much-colder-than-average winter temperature set any
kind of record for the region. Maybe I just wasn’t phrasing the search
correctly, or should have gone to a particular weather statistics site but I
came up empty-handed. There’s a term “Googlenope” for a word or phrase that
returns zero results. Maybe there should be a term “Googledope” for something
that is probably easy to find using Google, but due to incompetent search
terms, turns up nothing for the searcher.
However, while doing a Google
search on a particular topic, I often stumble across something I wasn’t looking
for, that is more interesting. In this case, it’s back to The Capital Weather
Gang, who compiled and posted this fascinating column on the record snows of
Washington, DC: http://wapo.st/1JQZBtM. Thanks,
Jason and team, for some of the best weather reporting of the week. No, make
that best weather reporting, consistently. DPW, I suggest you check this source next time, before you get all your snowplows all lined up and ready to go.
---------------------------
Still Life With Robin is
published on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.
No comments:
Post a Comment