By Matt Ritter, NBC Washington
WASHINGTON — As temperatures soar these last few days before Christmas in the eastern U.S. and the cold, wintry weather returns to the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, it may interest some to know the warm weather-related records for the big area airports here.
Note that some of these go way back before the construction of the airports, actually. Others are fairly recent.
Not only are some high temperature records this week in jeopardy, the “warm low” temperatures are as well, especially for Wednesday and Thursday. “Warm low” or “high minimums” are literally the warmest temperature than which it never got below on that date.
Note that at Dulles on Christmas in 1982, the Record High and Record Warm Low were the same day. That is, it got as high as 71 and never got lower than 50 degrees. The other thing about Christmas 1982 is that it was correlated with another strong El Niño pattern like this season.
(Editor’s Note: A plus sign in the above table indicates that the record is a tie for one or more previous years.
