user: Weird December weather ties at least one record high in the D.C. region

This post has been updated.

Two local airports came close to breaking record high temperatures on Saturday, one of which tied for the record.

Baltimore-Washington International climbed to 71 degrees at 3 p.m., Saturday, which tied the high temperature record for the date. The previous 71-degree record was set in 1979. BWI then fell to 64 degrees at 4 p.m.

At 3 p.m., Dulles International was also hit 71 degrees, which is just one degree short of their record of 72 set in 1979. The location couldn’t get any warmer at 4 p.m., though, and the temperature dropped to 69 degrees.

[D.C. area forecast: It’s springtime in December through Monday]

Reagan National has only managed to get to 66 degrees as of 3 and 4 p.m. — still well above average, but not as warm as the rest of the region because of a south wind off the Potomac, which is tends to cool the airport. National’s record high for the date is a long-standing one: 71 degrees set in 1873.

National — 48 degrees Dulles — 47 degrees BWI — 46 degrees

The abnormal warmth will continue through Monday ahead of a strong trough of high pressure that will bring our next chance of rain. As the trough digs east across the Central U.S., it’s pumping up warm air from the south out ahead of the cold front. This is pushing temperatures well above average for pretty much every state east of the Mississippi.

Temperatures in the D.C. region will climb into the mid to upper 60s on Sunday and Monday before the cold front blows through. Both days have the potential to set new records, though thick clouds will likely be a limiting factor for our warmth after today.

Records for Dec. 13 (Sunday)

National — 71 degrees (1889) Dulles — 71 degrees (1984) BWI — 69 degrees (1889)

Records for Dec. 14 (Monday)

National — 70 degrees (1931) Dulles — 67 degrees (2001) BWI — 71 degrees (1929)

Temperature records at National and BWI go back to 1872, though both locations changed the site of the sensor once. Records at Dulles go back to 1963.

Ian Livingston contributed to this post.

Angela Fritz is an atmospheric scientist and The Post's deputy weather editor.

Summary: With a temperature of 71 degrees at 3pm, BWI has tied its record high for the date, and Dulles is just one degree short of a record.


At Boston bombing trial, judge again refuses to move the venue

Judge George O’Toole, who has over the months leading up to the Boston Marathon bombing trial, occasionally expressed irritation with the efforts of the defense team to move the trial and have it postponed, is angry at the defense again. In a seven-page opinion issued on Friday, he denied all three of the defense’s pending motions and dressed the defense team down.

Attorneys for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the defendant, filed a motion for change of venue on Jan. 22. They analyzed the 1,373 questionnaires filled out by prospective jurors and quoted from a number of them in an effort to show that an impartial jury cannot be seated in Boston. The judge deemed the use of the quotes “improper” and ordered the motion sealed the same day it was filed – but not before some of the quotes had been published in The Boston Globe. In Friday’s ruling, the judge rejected the defense’s request to remove the “improper” label, explaining that the quotations violated a confidentiality promise he had publicly given the jurors – though the quotes were released anonymously. “After putting them in a public filing and thus having effectively invited the media to give them publicity, the defendant now piously complains about the level of media coverage,” wrote Judge O’Toole.

As for the motion itself, wrote the judge, it “has even less, not more, merit than the prior ones,” because the voir dire – the process of interviewing prospective jurors in person – is proving successful. It was originally planned for two weeks and has so far stretched for four, with at least one more to go. “That the voir dire process has been time-consuming is not an indication that a proper jury cannot be selected for this case,” wrote the judge. “It is rather in the main a consequence of the careful inquiry that the Court and counsel are making into the suitability of prospective jurors. That takes time, and we have been taking it.”

The voir dire process, wrote Judge O’Toole, has allowed the court to get beyond the fact that the vast majority of potential jurors had indicated that they already considered the defendant guilty on the basis of media coverage. Many of them would be able to set their preconceived opinion aside to consider the evidence. “For example, one human resources professional explained that it was a common occurrence in her experience for her initial impression of the merits of a workplace controversy to be altered or even reversed when she had information from a fuller or more careful investigation, and so she had learned to keep her judgment suspended until she had all the necessary information,” wrote the judge.

He was referring to Juror 129, interviewed on Jan. 22. Her former husband is a police officer, who knows someone who was at the marathon and was, she said, “harmed emotionally, not physically,” and who works with a former FBI agent who is on the witness list. None of these factors, however, meant that she was automatically disqualified from serving. So far in the course of voir dire the court seems to have excused only those candidates who said that they would be influenced by their personal connections to the bombing or who insisted that they could not weigh the evidence impartially. End-of-the-day decisions on which jurors are excused are not made public, but so far the court also seems to have consistently released people who would suffer demonstrable financial hardship if chosen for the jury and those who hold absolutist positions on the death penalty, whether they think it should never be applied or always be applied to convicted murderers. On Friday, the court also decided not to interview a woman who was involved with the Boston Strong movement, which formed to help victims after the bombing.

The defense has already filed a change-of-venue motion in the Court of Appeals, which rejected the previous one in a two-to-one decision. Now the court may look at the question of whether the voir dire process is as effective as Judge O’Toole believes. So far the court has interviewed 157 people, 15 of them on Friday. Of them, one would insist on the death penalty regardless of the evidence, one was born in Russia and is married to an MIT researcher, one has a brother in the Boston police and a sister who was near the marathon finish line, one was excused for hardship, and one had his interview cut short because he gave such contradictory responses that the lawyers on both sides grew exasperated. This left an unusually high number of apparently impartial jurors to appear in one day – four – and an equally high number of people who could not see themselves voting for the death penalty.

When a juror has indicated that he or she is opposed to the death penalty, the judge tries to ascertain how deep-seated the opposition is.

“Let’s see, how can I say that will be totally honest?” said Juror 353, an older white man with disheveled gray hair. “I don’t know how many thousands of rounds were fired at that boat [in which law enforcement found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding]. You couldn’t kill a man,” he said, apparently addressing the American system of law and order as represented by Judge O’Toole. “And I’m not going to kill him.”

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of seven books. Her book on the Boston marathon bombers, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, will be published in April.

Summary:

assistant: In a seven-page opinion, the judge denied all three of the defense's pending motions.