The 614cast
Thursday’s tl;dr
⛅ Partly sunny, high in the mid-teens.
Forecast highlights
🥶 Still awfully cold
Is it time for our eight-year-old to go back to school? The other day, I was 99.9% sure she wouldn’t have school Monday or Tuesday, and was not optimistic about the rest of the week… so far, that’s coming true. Shout-out to the other parents/caregivers who are also in this boat. (My wife is not disappointed I didn’t make it to Houston for the weather conference.)
All right, so let’s talk about how stupid cold it’s still going to be the next several days.
I bring a little good news with feels-like temperatures: winds will be light on Thursday through Friday morning, so the wind chill will basically match up with the actual temperature (which is why you don’t see the blue line during those times in the graph above).
We ought to have four more days with highs in the teens, but barely so on Saturday. Lows fall to near or a bit below zero Thursday morning, Friday morning, and Saturday morning.
As I posted Wednesday evening, if we can get to nine straight days with a high colder than 20, that’d set a new record for such a streak.
Below is a map of near or new record lows that are expected Thursday through Sunday. Columbus shows up because Saturday morning’s record low of -6° (set in 2004) is in play. I’ll add that the record cold high of 10° (1971) isn’t totally safe, either.
High pressure is in control the next several days, so snow chances are minimal for a while and partial sunshine should help our moods a little.
📈 Improvement (?) is on the way
It’s all relative, isn’t it? Highs in the 20s early next week will probably feel like heaven, despite being a fair bit short of average.
Yes, temperatures do slowly moderate after the weekend, but should stay below average until late next week. Here’s an animation of the AI flavor of the European forecast model ensemble Sunday through Saturday. Don’t worry about the numbers, just note the decreasing Purples and Blues of Doom.
📊 Thursday’s almanac
Normal low/high: 21 / 37
Record low/high: -13 (1963) / 67 (2013)
Sunrise/set: 7:42 a.m. / 5:57 p.m.
🫠 Melting magic
This is what my driveway looked like Monday morning after I did the final pass of clearing it.
This is what it looked like at the end of the day.
But I didn’t salt it! How did that snow melt even though it was way below freezing?
Ah, the power of objects absorbing sunlight. Some of the dark asphalt was exposed, so when the sun came out, it absorbed the sunlight (in the form of shortwave radiation) and warmed up enough to melt the snow.
Other objects do this, too. Here’s a photo from back in my Iowa days — the bark of this tree was dark enough to sufficiently warm to melt the dingy snow around it.
If you’ve worn a black shirt on a sunny summer day, you also know firsthand the whole “sun + dark color = hot.”
🌭 For the weather weenies
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Sleetslides cover railway tracks in West Virginia (Cass Scenic Railroad/Facebook)
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Meso-low swirls down Lake Michigan (Tom Skilling/Facebook)
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“Short Cut” summaries of American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (Weather with a Twist)
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Ohio Sea Grant diverts plastic as part of Great Lakes plastic cleanup partnership (Water Online)