Here comes the cold!

2011-01-22 23:10:02.000 – Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist

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Over New Year’s, I went out to southern California to visit my dad and step Mom. My step mom teaches fifth grade and just started teaching about weather after the holiday break. So, one day I went into her classroom with my dad (who is also a meteorologist) to talk to them about Mount Washington and meteorology. During my presentation, I asked the students: What temperatures do you consider ‘cold’? I got a variety of answers, but as you might expect from children that live in southern California, most of the answers were in the range of 30-50 degrees. Of course, I knew that I was going to get answer like that, and I also knew that telling them that we don’t consider it to be cold on Mount Washington until temperatures drop below zero would blow them away. It certainly did.

Tomorrow into Monday morning is going to be cold by just about anyone’s standards, unless you happen to live at a place like the South Pole or Siberia. An arctic front will pass through New England tomorrow, and behind it temperatures will plummet until late Sunday night, bottoming out some where around 30 to 35 below zero. These will be the coldest temperatures that we have measured since 2007, and will also likely be the coldest temperatures I have ever experienced. My current personal low temperature record is 30 below zero, which I experienced when I was a winter intern in February of 2006. It won’t be quite as windy as it was on the day in February 2006 though. During that particular event, winds were well over 100 mph, but tomorrow and Monday winds, will ‘only’ get to 50-70 mph.

So, if you live in the northeast, stay warm, and stay safe through this unseasonably cold weather over the next few days!

Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist