I just pulled up my town on “Yahoo Weather.” It says the current temperature here is -9F, the low for the day will be 8F, and the high will be 13F.
How the heck can it be 17 degrees COLDER than the low for the day?
(and, by the way, it’s warmed up significantly in the last couple of hours already, so the low for the day is at least 20 degrees colder than Yahoo is reporting).
I’ve noticed this bug myself for Chicago a couple days ago. The current temp was several degrees below the predicted low. A few hours later, they seem to have corrected it.
Its been like that for years too. The highs and lows that they show are typically the predicted highs and lows and not necessarily the observed highs and lows.
Maybe I shouldn’t guess in GQ, but I have seen this occur many times on weather.com and have heard it reported on the radio. It sounds really odd to hear someone say that today’s low will be 26 and it is currently 22.
What it looked like to me was that the high was the high for the upcoming day and the low for the upcoming night. Hence if today is colder than tomorrow, it could easily be lower at sunrise today than the forecast low which will most likely occur at sunrise tomorrow. But I am guessing.
Weather.com, what I use, predicts the high for the day and the low for the night, which means the night following today’s day. So, a high for today of 56 and a low for tonight of 20 means that it will be 20 tomorrow morning, usually an hour or two after sunrise.
So, in other words, the “low” listed on Weather.com for December 21 will actually occur on December 22, and there’s no way to tell what the actual lowest temperature on December 21 is going to be?
I wouldn’t say that there’s no way to tell what the actual lowest temperature on a given day will be. The WeatherChannel gives the local forecast and shows the predicted temperatures during the day and night at 3 hour intervals or so. It will usually give the predicted temperature for Midnight which will usually (but not always) be the lowest temp for the day.
Could it perhaps be that the reported current temperature has windchill factored in, when the reported low temperature is just the actual low temperature without windchill?
No. The ambient temperature and the WCF are given as such. In other words, the meteorologist will say that the current temp is 37 and the WCF is 10. Usually the predicted actual low temp, along with the concomitant WCF, will be given.
Modifying my prior post, the lowest temp of the day will usually actually be an hour or two after sunrise that day. Sometimes the midnight temp will be lower, but not usually. It all depends upon the air masses. Sometimes the temps will rise during the night due to a warm air mass moving in, even though temps usually drop at night for obvious reasons.
Definitely not. Yahoo Weather shows the actual temperature and the wind chill (“feels like”) temperature. At the time I wrote the OP, we had some nasty wind going, and they listed the wind chill at -36F.
As I sit here near Shelbyville, Indiana the actual temperature at 12:40 AM Christmas morning is -19 F. However, the Weather Channel also informs me that the “low” temp for my city tonight is -9F. I think the weather man is not awake to correct his forecast. I think they should make it a “standing order” never to let the actual high or low exceed the predicted values (in other words that would automatically correct the prediction to reflect the actual). It might be less honest, but it would also be less confusing.
Weather.com says the low last night in Shelbyville, Ind. was -21, but it is currently +17.