Every day has its weather, and each day’s skies and weather probably deserve to be judged on their own merits. Certainly, Washington’s weather on Saturday showed many merits and much of meteorological note.
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Although the temptation existed to think of how the sky looked on Sept. 11 2001, much could be learned from our sky on Sept. 11, 2021, considered for itself alone. Our Saturday gave possible hints of burning in the west, and of the ending of summer and the start of a new season.
In parts of the sky, at times during the day, on Saturday, we could be pardoned for claiming to see a certain hazy quality, a blurriness, an indistinctness.
This may have been a message on the atmospheric signboard about far-off woodland fires.
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On Friday, “a milky color” was filtering into our skies, the local office of the National Weather Service said in a tweet.
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“This is high-altitude wildfire smoke,” the tweet added.
More of it is expected here, according to the Weather Service.
Saturday’s skies seemed to present to us what we perhaps wished to see in them. Moments of the brightest blue and brilliant sunshine certainly appeared.
We could also see fleets of clouds, both billowing and flat bottomed, both light and dark, as if the overhead warehouses of water vapor had flung open their doors to reveal their full contents. All of their products, the flimsy and the gauzy, and the more substantial and imposing, seemed to float by at various overhead levels. Cloud layers slid apart, to reveal more clouds far above.
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In the official observations of the Weather Service, the skies were inscribed as each hour passed as mostly cloudy, or occasionally partly cloudy.
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Perhaps devoting such attention to each patch of sky, to the size and shape of every overhead collection of water droplets, might seem excessive on a random day in September. But Saturday was not a day on which the sky could escape notice.
People who were here on Saturday’s date 20 years ago may recount a variety of observations. But a great many people remember the sky as a backdrop to our history; they recall the contrast between the glittering beauty of the day and the terrible events that occurred on it.
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The skies on that day seemed deep blue, vividly blue, brilliantly blue, and unambiguously clear: free, it seemed, of any cloud or uncertainty.
To compare Saturday’s weather with that of 20 years ago seems to be asking much of any September day in Washington. It seemed at the time, and in memory as well, that on atmospheric quality, few days could match September 11, 2001,
Interestingly, however, for all the remembered crispness of 20 years ago, for all the recalled signs of autumn, Sept.11 2021 may have been the cooler day, even if only slightly. Saturday’s high was 80; according to the Weather Service, in 2001 it was 83. And it was a little cooler Saturday morning, too, 61 degrees against the 64 of Sept. 11 2001.