It’s been a month of bitter cold and surprisingly mild weather, and state climatologist Harry Hillaker says oddly enough, December, 2005 will go down in the weather records as average. It didn’t start out that way — the first week or so of December was very cold, the coldest start of the month we’ve ever had. But the most recent week or so has been mild — almost as far ABOVE normal as the first week was below average. Usually Hillaker notes we get the warmer part of the month first, but this year things just reversed. Hillaker calculates December likely will average out to a couple degrees colder than normal and even with a little snow lately, precipitation records will show a snowier month than normal. Hillaker sees some signs that it’ll remain mild into the first few weeks of the new year.
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