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Boston basks in record high, but first snow expected Saturday

E-mail|Link|Comments () December 3, 2009 07:09 PM

Globe photo by David L. Ryan

Boston University students take to the green on a lawn during a class break under the warm late-fall sun.

By Jack Nicas, Globe Correspondent

It was not Christmas in July, but it sure felt like it.

As T-shirted workers prepared Boston’s Christmas tree today for its official lighting -- the symbolic start of the city’s holiday season -- joggers, dog-walkers, and college students playing hooky were delighted and dumbfounded by the record-breaking high temperatures.

“I’ve never worn shorts in December before,” said Emerson College sophomore Margaret Bateman, who was skipping class sprawled in the Boston Common grass.

Temperatures hovered in the upper 60s from dawn to the late afternoon, hitting 69 degrees at Logan Airport at 2 p.m. Boston’s previous record high for Dec. 3 was 65 degrees in 1932. Norwood hit 70 just after noon.

But more seasonal weather will return all too soon: “The season’s first snow should come on Saturday night,” said Bill Simpson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Taunton. “There will be some possible accumulation on grassy surfaces.”

Simpson’s colleague, Eleanor Vallier-Talbot, said the path of a storm moving up the coast will determine how much snow.

“There’s a low-pressure area working its way up the Eastern Seaboard,'' she said. "We could see some snow, but not a lot because the storm seems to be staying far enough off the coast. If it does come close, we could get upwards of an inch, mainly in the higher terrains.”

Boston is likely to see mainly rain with “maybe a few flakes” Saturday night, she said. Temperatures will be in the lower 50s on Friday.

But snow was far from the minds of many enjoying today’s warmth.

Jaime Hutkin, a Pennsylvania native about to start her first winter in Boston, said she does not believe the hype about New England weather.

“Everybody told me that it’s unpredictable and that it’s really cold; well, it seems like everyone has been lying,” she said in a tank top while perched under the sun. “I want a white Christmas, but I am enjoying it now.”

But the weather was not as welcoming hours before. The storm that carried today’s heat from the Gulf of Mexico also brought two-thirds of an inch of rain and near-hurricane force winds overnight to the area, meteorologists said.

Gusts reached 49 miles per hour at Logan this morning and 69 miles per hour at Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Simpson said. Other instruments at the observatory, which is 635 feet above sea level, measured gusts as high as 75 miles per hour. A Category 1 hurricane has sustained winds of 74 mph.

Sharon Smith of Beacon Hill said she was worried her husband’s early morning flight to Las Vegas would be delayed, but then the skies cleared and it left on time.

“And there’s a cold frost expected [in Las Vegas] this weekend,” she said. “It’s warmer here than there. Go figure.”