Easter Dates How Easter is Determined

Do you ever wonder why Easter can be in March or even late April ? Easter is determined as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. We know that the vernal equinox can vary up to a day or so but when you factor in the moon cycle the date of Easter can really change. For example if the full moon is the day before the vernal equinox then Easter is at least another twenty eight days away, possibly more depending on the day the equinox hit. The latest Easter could fall is April 25th. The earliest Easter could occur is March 22nd, which was the date of Waster in 1818 and will be again in the year 2285. Some governments and churches have tried to suggest a fixed date for the holiday, the second Sunday of April, but that idea hasn’t exactly caught on yet. For all you math majors out there Easter dates repeat exactly every 5,700,000 years. Since the date varies so widely so does the weather. I can remember Easters with highs near 90 degrees and some Easters with a few flakes flying. It looks like a cold, blustery Easter this year. Given our weather this year we wouldn’t picking out our spring clothes just yet but it is Easter after all. You might want to wear a coat over your Easter clothes and you better hang on to your bonnets.  ¶ 1:12 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Vernal Equinox Spring is Here

The Vernal Equinox occurs tonight at 1:48 in the morning. This marks the beginning of astronomical spring. The sun is directly over the equator making it equal day and night for each hemisphere. We go into spring while the southern hemisphere heads into fall. You might ask why the sunrise and sunset times are not exactly twelve hours apart on the first day of spring. The earth’s atmosphere bends the light so there is not exactly twelve hours between the sunrise and sunset on Thursday. As we move toward summer the sun’s angle will continue to rise. The angle of the sun is the key to climate. Yes, the days get longer and the jet streams retreat to the north but the angle of the sun is what drives climate. The higher the angle, the more overhead, the stronger the sun’s rays will be. You might also be asking yourself why it’s not the same time and same day every year. Well, the reason goes back to my leap year column. The solar year is about 365 and a quarter days so the time and date of spring and of all of the seasons can vary about a day or so. It still looks like March is going to stay below average in terms of temperatures for the remainder of the month. March came in like a lamb it reserves the right to go out like a lion.  ¶ 5:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Cherry Blossoms We showed some video on our air last Friday of some cherry blossoms in bloom. Yes, this is early but the peak bloom should still arrive late this month according to the National Park Service. They are predicting peak bloom between March 27th and April 3rd. My haunch is this might have to moved up just a bit. Peak bloom has arrived as early March 15th in 1990 and as late as April 18th in 1958. The average peak bloom is April 4.

The 46th annual Cherry Blossom Festival runs from March 29th though April 13th. On March 27th, 1912 with little fan fare First Lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda, the wife of the Japanese ambassador planted the first two cherry trees. That year some 3000 trees of twelve varieties were shipped to Washington. Now some 86 years later the blooming of the trees is how Washingtonian’s mark the arrival of spring. The single white blossoms belong to the Yoshino trees. Akebono have a single pale, pink blossom. The Park Service puts in two months of preparation before the festival and to ensure the health of the trees year round. To allow the trees to breathe two inch holes are drilled into the compacted ground. Crews of four carefully examine the trees looking for pests, mark branches with yellow ribbon to be cut. They trim dead limbs the size of matchsticks.

Once the blossoms are in peak you’ll have another 10 – 12 days to enjoy them. After they bloom wind is their biggest enemy. The 3500 to 3800 trees, depending on whom you talk to, that line the tidal basin will attract more than 650,000 visitors. Metro says they’re ready. Please remember to look and not to touch. You wouldn’t want a ticket.  ¶ 6:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The Super Storm of '93 On March fifth, 1993 I walked into my boss’s office and told him a week from Saturday would be the end of the world as he knew it. My old boss was a weather geek like me and knew exactly what I meant. On March ninth my second daughter was born and the Blizzard ’93 was another four days away. The Super Storm of ’93 was on the computer models for ten days straight. The position and strength wavered very little in those ten days. Model consistency over a ten day period is rare and we are talking about less refined models fifteen years ago than the ones we have now. In fact the model that tracked the storm with great accuracy does not even exist today. I couldn’t work the days leading up to the storm with the new addition to the family. I was in charge of my oldest daughter who at the time who was not quite two and very sick. I returned to work the Monday after the Blizzard and tried to put things in perspective. The storm did not produce a great deal of snow in the immediate Metro Area mainly due to the mixing of sleet with the snow. I have never seen it sleet that hard before or since. The sound on the roof of my house was unbelievable. National recorded only 6.5” while Dulles measured 11”. More than half the season’s snowfall fell with that one storm. We still ended with below average snowfall for the winter. I tried to explain on the air that in terms of pressure this was the strongest winter storm ever in recorded in the East. National set a new low for pressure at 28.54”. The storm had a lower central pressure than hurricane Hugo ! Our weather watchers to the west that received all snow were buries under 40” ! Snow fell from Alabama to Maine. Birmingham, Alabama had 13” while Chattanooga had a record 22”. Syracuse received 43”. The storm caused six billion in damage. A lot of folks don’t remember the other storm we had just about ten days earlier that produced two to four inches of rain with forty to sixty mile per hour winds. It’s a good thing that wasn’t a snowstorm or we would have been buried most of the first half of March.  ¶ 4:30 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  A 47 hour Weekend The idea of Daylight Saving Time is credited to Benjamin Franklin back in 1784. When he was a delegate to France he wrote of his idea in an essay entitled ‘An Economical Project’. A London builder, William Willett tried to popularize the idea in a 1907 pamphlet entitled ‘A Waste of Daylight’. We adopted Daylight Saving Time in 1918 and then repealed in 1919. A few states and cities continued to use DST on a voluntary basis. From 1942 to 1945 President Roosevelt instituted year round daylight saving time known as War Time. After World War II since there was no federal law in effect DST again was left to the whims of each state and localities. You can imagine the confusion. Daylight Saving time saves energy. President Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act of 1973. Now we change the clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November as mandated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. When we spring forward patrons in a bar lose an hour of drinking. Yes, this has led to riots in some cities. There is another story, I’m not sure it’s true, but it is very interesting. During the Vietnam War, for all you youngsters we had a draft back then, a man from Delaware, who was born just after midnight DST would have been drafted but he argued his birthday was an hour earlier, because standard time was the state’s official time to record births. By declaring his birthday one hour earlier he was assigned a higher draft number on the previous day and missed the draft. Before you go to bed Saturday night remember to turn your clocks ahead one hour. (Spring forward) Please also remember to replace the batteries in your smoke detectors this weekend.  ¶ 6:44 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Ash Wednesday Storm 1962 In 1962 a tremendous winter storm begins to hammers the Atlantic Coast. The storm caused more than 200 million in damage from Florida to Southern New England. Waves crested to 40' with winds of 70 mph off our coast. This storm was dubbed the 'Ash Wednesday Storm'. The storm affected the east coast from the fifth to the ninth. It was centered off of Wallops Island for forty eight hours. The storm was responsible for forming two new inlets south of Ocean City between Ocean City and the Bay. Late winter storms will often become cut off in the upper levels of the atmosphere and be unable to move. A circular jet stream forms around the storm keeping it in place. Farther inland snow was the problem. Silver Spring received 11" of snow while Rockville recorded 19". Charlottesville had more than two feet with 26". Farther west 32" fell in Winchester. Three feet of snow was common in our mountains. For some of you locals that vacation in South Bethany when the tide is very low sometimes you can still see a chimney out in the water. (At least I did about ten years ago.) This storm completely took out the first row of ocean front homes. This was one of the most damaging storms to hit the DelMarVa. A full moon coupled with a series of high tides produced massive flooding. Nor’easters can do more damage than hurricanes because of their duration. Winds buffeted our coast for days. Some debris from fifty miles away washed up on Chincoteague. Some reports claim half of the wild ponies on the island were killed.  ¶ 4:58 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Meteorological Winter Wrap-up Let’s wrap up the meteorological winter stats. All of us in the 9 News Now Weather Center predicted a milder than average winter with less than average snowfall. In my mind, unfortunately we were all right. I would much rather have been wrong but with a strong La Nina winter the odds were stacked against us having a cold and/or snowy winter. We made into the seventies in January and February. December’s average high was over one and one half degrees above average with January over four degrees milder than average and February coming in over three degrees above average. We were only below freezing at night (National) thirty one days. On average the temperature dips below freezing seventy one times during meteorological winter. We had three wimpy snowfalls. Our first snow was on December fifth when 2.6” inches fell officially at National. Two to four inches fell in our suburbs. We had another 1.3” snowfall in January on the seventeenth. This time four to seven inches fell in our northern and western suburbs. Our last snow measured 1” with the bull's eye of two to three inches in our southern and eastern suburbs. New York City recorded no snowfall in the month of January for the first time in seventy five years.


December: Average Observed High: 47.6 (+1.6)
Average High: 47.0
Precip: 3.26” Avg. Precip: 3.05”
Snowfall: 2.6” Avg. Snowfall: 3.1”

January: Average Observed High: 47.5
Average High: 43.0
Precip: 1.37” Avg. Precip: 3.21”
Snowfall: 1.3” Avg. Snowfall: 6.2”

February: Average Observed High: 49.4
Average High: 46.0
Precip: 4.19” Avg. Precip: 2.63”
Snowfall: 1” Avg. Snowfall: 6.3”

Total Snowfall: 4.9” Average Snowfall Dec – Feb: 15.6”
Total Days w/ Lows less than 32 degrees: 31 days Avg. (Dec – Feb) 71 days  ¶ 11:53 AM 0 Comments Links to this post