Some Common Questions and Misconceptions About Mount Washington 2019-02-22 09:14:51.000 - Thomas Padham, Weather Observer/Education Specialist   How do you measure snowfall in high winds? Accurately measuring snowfall can be challenging or even impossible in very high winds. During the early days of the observatory we discovered that using a Nipher Screen can help to more accurately capture snowfall during moderate (30-60 mph) winds. This Nipher screen is basically a large funnel over the top portion of the precipitation stand which helps create a vacuum to capture snowflakes. Our winter precipitation cans are also taller than the summer season can

Working Nights with a Full Moon 2019-02-20 05:09:40.000 - Adam Gill, Weather Observer/IT Specialist   Working nights can be taxing on your sleep schedule but there are quite a few moments of peacefulness. My favorite nights to work are nights with light winds and a full moon in the winter. The past few days have featured such nights. The moon has been so bright that I have not needed to let my eyes adjust for long to be able to distinguish landmarks! One of the nights, the clouds had cleared after some snow showers and I did not need to

Battles with Blowing Snow 2019-02-18 10:57:20.000 - Ian Bailey, Weather Observer/Education Specialist   Mt. Washington is home to the World’s Worst Weather. If you are from the area, a frequent visitor or have been to the summit, you have likely heard this before. And there is a lot of truth in that statement! We see insane wind speeds throughout the year, frequently gusting to or above 100 mph. We see incredible amounts or snow and ice, with the snow pack sometimes lasting well into the summer! And for 2/3 of the year, we have fog with low visibility! Over the

The Wonders of the World 2019-02-16 07:42:12.000 - Jay Broccolo, Summit Intern   When I woke up this morning, knowing I was going to write a blog post today, I had no idea what I was going to discuss. I played with the idea of discussing the weather, but I figured there are plenty of outlets for that happen through our forecasts, FB live events, and social media, to mention a few. I made my coffee and headed up to the weather room remembering that the skies had cleared before I went to bed, so there was still a chance

The Anything-But Calm Before the Storm! 2019-02-11 08:31:34.000 - Chloe Boehm, Summit Intern   The summit this weekend saw a pretty incredible wind event with a peak gust of 148 mph. Although the highest winds were on Saturday, Friday morning saw the most dramatic increase in wind speed. The winds jumped from 45 mph to 124 mph in just 7 minutes! For those of us working in the weather room, it seemed to come out of nowhere! One minute we could barely hear the wind at all, and the next, a roar of wind erupted. (Picture of the wind gust

An Account of the 148 mph Storm 2019-02-10 09:14:33.000 - Thomas Padham, Weather Observer/Education Specialist   The past 36 hours on the summit were an amazing show of the power of nature, and one that I’ll personally remember for a lifetime. Winds topped 148 mph at approximately 6:50 AM on February 9th, 2019, shattering my previous personal record of 133 mph! The storm was by far the most impressive wind event I’ve witnessed in my 6 years on the summit, here’s some more details on what it was like to be up here during the storm. Surprisingly, I slept very

Summer 2019 Internships 2019-02-08 06:12:03.000 - Thomas Padham, Weather Observer/Education Specialist   Although the calendar reads February and we’ve still got a lot of winter to go, it’s not too early to start thinking about the summer season! I personally started here at the Observatory as a summer intern, and it was a decision that helped shape my career today. We are accepting applications through March 5th, so there’s only a few more weeks to go. The summer internship can still have a taste of winter! Summer 2018 intern Simon helped de-ice the instrumentation in June.  The summer internship is

Windy Year Statistics so Far 2019-02-04 13:28:45.000 - Adam Gill, Weather Observer/IT Specialist   There have been several blogs so far over the past few weeks that have been talking about how windy this winter has been compared to past winters. I pulled together some data and did some light analysis on it to see how it stacks up as well. I grabbed daily average winds and then created a Boolean where if the day had winds over 100 it was 1 and if not it was zero. I then created a running average over 365 days for the wind

From Day to Night 2019-02-02 15:18:55.000 - Ian Bailey, Weather Observer/Education Specialist   It certainly has been an interesting shift so far. This is our first week back after our Night Observer Chris moved on from the Observatory. Obviously there is a bit of a void, as Chris is a great meteorologist who brought a lot of heart and character to our crew. You can tell that everyone misses him pretty badly, with each us of dealing with his departure differently. I mean, even several of the New Hampshire State Parks crew have come around asking if he is still

My 5th Volunteer Trip! 2019-02-01 13:32:18.000 - Jeffrey Swanson, Summit Volunteer   This year marked my fifth volunteer trip to the MWObs weather station on the summit of Mt Washington. I have always enjoyed these trips, with each one offering a different perspective. This trip our team was locked in the clouds with wind, rain, and snow. We achieved clearing on Monday that offered our first opportunity for photographs! A significant part of what volunteers do here is to prepare meals for the summit teams and the visiting day and overnight trips to the observatory. This years hiking groups had