A Day With Great Views

2010-10-02 23:00:26.000 – Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist

My attempt at an artsy shot

The first few days of this shift have been nothing short of a washout. Steady rain started falling at about 8 a.m. on Thursday, and didn’t stop until about 10 p.m. on Friday. That’s more than 36 hours of continuous rain with just over 4 inches being measured in our precipitation can. All that rain, fog, and generally wet weather made what happened today just that much more fulfilling.

After some glaze icing during the overnight hours, fog started to break up this morning, giving us glimpses of bright blue sky. To the southeast, those breaks also revealed a stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean. We occasionally get this view at this time of year, when the sun rises above the right part of the horizon to reflect its light off the water and giving it a golden color that clearly delineates the coastline. So, while this is not a rare thing to see, it is always impressive, and seemed particularly impressive today. I took this opportunity to put to use our (relatively) new HDV camera. This camera is capable of shooting very high quality footage, and was a very generous donation from our friends at WOKQ, one of the radio stations that owns a broadcast antenna on the summit. Not only is the footage shot with this camera crystal clear, but it also turns out to have pretty incredible zoom capabilities, allowing me to get a really nice closeup of the coast of Maine. I uploaded some of the footage I shot to our YouTube site so that you can check it out!

All that would have been plenty for one day, but it got even better. Toward sunset, the clouds that had been hanging around below the summit all day began to ‘flow’ around the mountain, spilling over the Northern Presidentials into the Great Gulf and squeezing through Crawford Notch to the south. This produced another good round of pictures and video, which I will get uploaded tomorrow morning at some point. These pictures (once uploaded), along with other pictures taken of the view of the ocean, can be viewed on our page on Facebook.

All in all, just another day at the office!

Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist