A mild, wet New Year’s Eve
This evening’s Bears-Packers game and other Chicago area New Year’s Eve celebrations will take place under cloudy and rainy skies, but with mild temperatures.
Afternoon readings climb to a relatively balmy 50º, a level reached in Chicago on only nine New Year’s Eves since 1870.
Midnight revelers will experience temperatures in the lower or middle 40s along with rain and fog. That stands is sharp contrast to a crystal-clear atmosphere that prevailed across the city on Dec. 31, 1967, when the thermometer hovered at -9º at the stroke of midnight—the lowest temperature ever registered in the city at the very moment the clock clicked into the new year. Somewhat colder temperature return to the area on Monday, along with a little snow, but the prevailing mild pattern that begin in early December persists. Rain and readings near 50º arrive again later in the week.
--By Richard Koeneman, WGN Weather Center Meteorologist