The Washington area has a 33 percent chance of seeing snow on Jan. 20, presenting yet another obstacle to the hoards of people planning to travel downtown for Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“There’s a one-in-three chance that there will be snow into Tuesday morning,” said Alex Sosnowski, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.com.
An Alberta clipper, which is a fast-moving Canadian storm system that can cause temperatures to drop by 30 degrees in as little as 10 hours, is expected to sweep down from central Canada on Monday.
Meteorologists say it’s possible the storm will exit off the Atlantic coast before sending D.C. snow on inauguration day.
There are also indications that another storm may come up from the South and develop directly off the Virginia coast on Monday, according to AccuWeather. Heavier snow could affect the area Monday night if the storm were to develop further.
“When you’re talking six days out, you can’t get too specific,” said Topper Schutt, chief meteorologist for WUSA, television’s Channel 9. “What you can say with more confidence is that it should be very cold.”
If a storm does materialize on Inauguration Day, it wouldn’t be the first time spectators have braved the chill to see a president sworn in.
President William Henry Harrison delivered a nearly two-hour inaugural address— the longest in U.S. history — on a wet, 48-degree, overcast March day in 1841. Just 30 days after he was sworn in, Harrison died of pneumonia, which is believed to have been caused by the weather during his inaugural address, and set another record — the shortest presidential term in U.S. history.
Outdoor events planned for President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985 were canceled when temperatures, which felt like 10 to 20 degrees below zero due to strong winds, dipped as low as 7 degrees. But the worst inauguration weather descended on the city for President William H. Taft’s 1909 swearing-in. After D.C. was blanketed with 10 inches of snow, Taft’s ceremony was forced indoors.
“Weather is the biggest challenge we face,” said Lt. Mike Billips, spokesman for the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee. “Different agencies have different responsibilities. [Bad weather] is something we have been planning for since the beginning.”
A decision to cancel the inauguration parade due to poor weather would be made the night before by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inauguration Ceremonies.
“We won’t have a good idea until the end of the week whether or not D.C. will get snow,” Schutt said. “The point is to get people loosely prepared.”
