Warm greeting awaits Trump administration
Temperatures will be 50-ish on Inauguration Day; mild spell to continue.
John F. Kennedy famously walked overcoat-less along Pennsylvania Avenue before taking the oath of office on a frosty Jan. 20, 1961, when the temperature didn't get above 26 and 8 inches of snow covered the nation's capital.
Appropriately, Robert Frost, one of the all-time great weather writers and one who had a profoundly poetical relationship with winter, read an original poem for the occasion.
What followed was one of the colder decades in the period of record, locally and globally. The climate these days is somewhat different, and not just thermally.
When Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Friday, the temperature should be a good 25 degrees warmer than it was the day Kennedy was inaugurated.
The weather forecast promises nothing eventful that day, maybe some showers, but temperatures several degrees above normal for the date could well draw more attention than usual.
On Wednesday, the National Centers for Environmental Information and NASA are expected to crown 2016 as the warmest year on record in their respective databases, based on estimates of monthly surface temperatures.
These will be the last monthly and annual reports issued by NCEI, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Obama.
During the Obama administration, NOAA has been aggressive in publicizing global-temperature increases and drawing attention to various climate-change reports.
Left to be seen is whether that will continue with the change in political climate.