It says the same thing for Seattle (that it was 9a then 8b), but I made my own chart using the data direct from NOAA and it looks very different. I feel like maybe wapo did a bad job visualizing the data accurately. Here’s mine for Seattle based on data from 1948 to end of 2022, with the 30-year average starting in 1977. You can see it’s almost 8a (i.e. cold 8b) at the beginning, crossed to 9a in 2013:
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