This Can't Be Winter?

Across the northern hemisphere, ski boots, parkas, hats and gloves are coming out of closets and storage bags.  Having experienced a variety of winters and noticing that December is half way behind us, I'm taking a more critical look into the San Francisco winter.

I used one of my under graduate elective courses to study weather.  Yep...weather. Go Jackets!  Based on that experience, I do confidently declare the correlation and causation between latitude and seasonal
temperatures.  Money well spent, indeed!

Having spent no less than four seasons in various regions of the eastern seaboard, my interrogation of winter will begin using the popular financial forecasting method of...guessing (otherwise known as observing comparables).

San Francisco’s latitude places it somewhere north of the Richmond and south of the DC domiciles.

• Washington, DC 38°53′42.4″N
• San Francisco, CA 37°47′N
• Richmond, VA 37°32′27.5″N

For those playing along at home, San Francisco is roughly 400 miles further south than Bostonia.  As luck may have it, San Francisco experiences both warmer temperatures and smaller temperature variations.

Winter in DC is an interesting beast.  The daily highs are above freezing and the nightly lows below.  Throw some moisture in the mix and it all makes for an wintery icy mess.

It was the winter at RMC that taught me the true meaning of 100 miles.  In Ashland (10 miles north of
Richmond), snow is rare.  I recall one of the annual snowstorms…er, dustings.  I barely knew how to react when one of our friends confessed that it was their first experience of snow!  Of course,
classes were cancelled the following day.  It was then that I learned that the county didn’t own a single snow plow.  Huh?!

And then there’s San Francisco.  No snow, no ice, no sub-zero temps.  Not too bad, eh?  This is the first January since Jake joined us that I don’t need to put on snowboard pants to go on the night walk.  What a relief!

Conclusion: grab your clubs and catch me if you can.