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First of all I hate putting this up in the middle of Chris’s basketball preview.  If you have not yet read part 1, please see below.  I think he did a great job and I hate having something as trivial as the weather forecast push it out of view.  So check it out now  and then come back to this.  Now on to your regulary scheduled post:

Hello, my name is Bob, and I may be the only University of Maryland Graduate who never took Psych 101 at CP.  Despite knowing nothing about psychology, I’m going to attempt to make some sense, but please take it with a grain of salt.  I don’t have near the expertise that some of my fellow alumni’s may have on the subject.  With that tongue in cheek endorsement, it seems to me that it is human nature to seek out patterns.  To tie independant events into related occurances.  It is why we as a people are such sticklers for superstition. 

Think back in the day.  A farmer out toiling in his field walks back to his hut, and in his path is a black cat.  Two days later his family gets the plague and all die.  It must have been the black cat right?  We just can’t grasp that things are sometimes randomly determined.  There has to be a cause and effect, and if there isn’t we’ll dig around until we find one.  Now here we are 700 years later and we still fall into the same traps!  Should we be wiser…YES, are we?  No!

And here is why.  The last few years of Maryland Football have been pretty prosperous (relatively speaking) and as a result a majority of our home football games have been played in pretty ideal conditions.  No one can ever prove this, but I think a few years back I went two straight seasons wearing shorts to every home game.  I remember because I was stupid enough to wish for a cold weather game.  Anyway, human nature..good times…good weather.  They are related.

Flash forward to 2009, we have had a few decent weather games, but overall each tailgate/home game has been an adventure.  Even the nice weather ones have been touch and go (trust me I’ve been doing these forecasts for a long time, never have I seen so many 3 day forecasts change as drastically as they have this year).  So bad time begets bad weather.  Makes perfect sense right?

Well this Saturday could be the ultimate example of how the weather and Maryland Football are related.  Earlier in the week this was looking like an awesome day, not a cloud in the sky, not a drop of rain in the forecast, but each day that outlook has grown a little more questionable.  Thousands of miles to our South a tropical wave started to gain some rotation, then it became a little better organized, and then it developed winds of over 45 mph and was named Ida.  It brushed the Yucatan Pennisula and headed north.  It gained wind speeds to over 100 mph but was torn apart by less than ideal upper atmospheric conditions.  It limped to shore, luckily as a Tropical Storm.  And then it decided to head to the Mid Atlantic.

Whenever there is a wild card like a tropical system, it makes any kind of long range forecast a guess.  Will it move this way, or will it move that way.  As much as we’ve learned about Hurricanes in the last century we still don’t know exactly where they want to go, but we are getting closer.  For Ida, she wants to come to College Park.  Not for a brief 12 hour visit, but for a lingering annoying house guest length of time.  Will she be out of here by Saturday, who knows.  The forecast yesterday for VT was all sun, now it’s cloudy with a 20% chance of rain.  If I know my superstitions, and I know my 2009 Football season, don’t look for sunny skies on Saturday, just yet.

With that, lets get on to the forecast.  The average high on November 14th in College Park is 58 F.  The average low is 40 F.  The record high is 77 F which means we are now to a point in the year where it has never been 80 F or higher.  So long early to mid fall.  The record low is 19 F.  The forecast is for 63 F which is actually pretty good, and the forecast low is 50 F, again not bad.  But our once sunny cloud free day is now mostly cloudy with a 20% chance of rain.  With so much uncertainty this may be a forecast that bears watching over the next few days.  Because whatever does happen on Saturday, isn’t going to be what was predicted on Wednesday morning.  But based on our football season, I think we know which way it’s going to go. 

Extra Droppings:

Due to the combination of Ida’s remenants and a low off the coast, the National Weather Service is predicting Ocean City could see waves up to 20 feet high later this week.  If we didn’t have the game, I think I might head down to check that out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 7:28 am and is filed under Maryland Terps Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.