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I was looking at the forecast for today and saw that the projected high for the day was 53 F. But when I went to bed last night at 0100 it was in the mid 70's. You are obviously not counting from midnight. When does the weather day begin?
Bret G.
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This question rocks! Bret wrote this question in when we had a powerful cold front blow through SLC at around midnight.
Forecast high temperatures usually reflect the afternoon high. This is because it's what people dress for typically. If we showed the 7 day and put the high for X day at 75 when the the 1 am temperature was 75 but the 3 pm temperature is actually 45 you'd be pretty angry with us when you got dressed in the morning.
High temperature usually occur in the afternoon if nothing major is going on. On days with a strong cold frontal passage, the high will likely occur before the front moves through. On this particular day, the high was shortly after midnight. Actually, if we pull the observations up (link on the right) you can see for yourself what happened on late Tuesday into Wednesday morning. When you click the links, scroll down to the bottom for the hourly observations.
The front actually came through around 11 pm with the pressure dropping down to a minimum of 29.25 in of Hg or 990.4 mb. That's amazing, look at the pressure drop from 10:40 pm to 10:56 pm, that's huge! Holy Cold Front Batman! Anyway, so the high temperature for Wednesday, if you click the second link was actually around midnight in the 60's. The afternoon highs on Wednesday mostly stayed in the 40's.
We give what is going to affect the most amount of people in the forecast. Some people do work at midnight but the majority of our viewers are going to get up early and go out and come home in the afternoon or evening, we want everyone to be prepared for the weather.
The weather day does begin at 00:00 o' clock for us for climate reasons. So when you see a daily high and low it will encompass the whole day on an almanac chart.
Answered by KSL Meteorologist Dina Freedman.
