Thursday’s reading of 50º at Midway Airport marked the eighth day this month that Chicago’s afternoon temperature has reached 50º. That’s not a record (December 1998 registered 11 days at or above 50º), but it is nearly triple the number of such days (three) experienced in an average December.
Midway Airport weather historian Frank Wachowski reports that as of Dec. 28, the month’s average temperature came in at 35.6º, fully 6.7 degrees above normal and enough to qualify as the ninth-mildest December in 79 years of weather records at that site.
And mild temperatures are forecast to persist through the holiday weekend. As a powerful and slow-moving new storm system organizes over the nation’s midsection, Chicago and the Midwest will lie in the storm’s warm, moist half. That means rain for us, but another major snowstorm—the second in a week—for the central Plains (including Denver).
--By Richard Koeneman, WGN Weather Center Meteorologist
WGN-TV Chief Meteorologist Tom Skilling and the WGN Weather Center staff provide daily coverage of weather in the Chicago area.
