Incoming Wind Event 2016-11-10 16:06:42.000 - Taylor Regan, Summit Intern   An incoming cold front will bring gusty winds and the lowest temperatures of the season thus far to the summit, beginning tonight and lingering through the weekend. Winds will be sustained above hurricane force for much of this time, with gusts approaching 100 mph. Why are we expecting such high winds with this event? One reason is the pressure gradient associated with the passage of the front. Looking at the map below, imagine that the gap between each set of lines represents a “step.” Furthermore, to get from an

An Internship on Mount Washington 2016-11-08 11:08:57.000 - Mike Carmon, Weather Observer & Education Specialist   One of our most exciting programs here at the Mount Washington Observatory is our summit internship program. Interns spend a season (fall, winter, or summer) working alongside summit observers, working their same week on/week off schedule, living and working on the summit of Mount Washington during their on-shift. It's an awesome opportunity to get real-world experience in the field of meteorology, and learn firsthand what it takes to operate a weather station in such a complex and harsh environment. Interns often move on to

De-Icing Instrumentation in 60 mph Winds 2016-11-06 06:12:37.000 - Caleb Meute, Weather Observer/Meteorologist   Check out this video of me de-icing in high winds yesterday:       Caleb Meute, Weather Observer/Meteorologist

UK College Students Experience Mount Washington 2016-11-03 15:58:26.000 - Eric Kelsey, Director of Research   Tuesday, I had the pleasure of hosting 20 students and professors from the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom, at the summit. We could not have asked for better weather for November 1; clear skies, winds less than 30 mph and temperatures in the low to mid 30s. Best of all, the students were excited to roam the snow and rime encrusted summit in these beautiful sunlit conditions.       The students worked in 8 pairs to measure wind speed and direction around the summit

An Amazing Week! 2016-11-01 08:14:29.000 - Bill Ofsiany & John Donovan, Summit Volunteers   How do you rate your week on the summit? Probably the best way would be to add up all the things that happened while you were here.  One would be getting almost all of Octobers average snowfall coming down while we were here. Then have eagle feather rime ice cover everything on the summit. Then have a storm cover those formations with pop corn rime, and turn it into massive shapes, like you see in historic polar photographs. Fog doesn't do justice to spectacular rime formations,

Happy Halloween! 2016-10-31 22:30:00.000 - Ryan Knapp, Weather Observer/Staff Meteorologist   Happy Halloween from the summit of Mt Washington! Hopefully everyone had (or is having) a safe evening in the lowlands. On the summit, we opted to keep it low key, carving some pumpkins and eating candy that our volunteers brought up and that our valley staff sent up. This year we brought two pumpkins to carve up. The pumpkin I carved out was of Marty Kitty wearing a wizard's hat and holding a jack-o-lantern. The other pumpkin was carved out in the shape of our logo (complete with a

A Great Way to Kick Off Winter! 2016-10-30 16:29:23.000 - Tom Padham, Weather Observer/Meteorologist   It’s been a pretty wild shift week on the summit! After seeing above average temperatures and no real sign of winter our previous shift, this week has been a near polar (pun intended) opposite. Since Wednesday we’ve picked up 15.3” of snow, with most of that falling during our first major snowstorm of the season for the higher elevations on Friday when we picked up 10.6”. It was a lot of fun returning to winter conditions on the summit and battling the elements outside! Our

Upslope Snow “Orographic Lifting” 2016-10-28 19:02:00.000 - Taylor Regan, Summit Intern   With the ongoing storm forecasted to drop upwards of a foot of snow on the higher summits, and heavy rain across much of the region, one question you might have is, why does the heaviest predicted precipitation often seem to be concentrated to one side of a mountain range? One reason is a phenomenon called orographic lift.   In general, orographic lifting is a process that occurs when low level (surface) winds are driven into an obstruction, such as a mountain range, and forced to rise up and

OLLI comes to MWO 2016-10-24 23:18:42.000 - Will Broussard, Education Coordinator   On Wednesday the Education Department of the Mount Washington Observatory completed a three week adult education course on the basics of meteorology and forecasting with local Mount Washington Valley residents. The course was titled; “Life, Work and Environment at the Mount Washington Observatory” and was presented to members of the Conway branch of OLLI at Granite State College. OLLI, an acronym for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is a volunteer-run membership organization founded by the Bernard Osher Foundation in 2000 with “an open invitation for individuals 50+ years of

Getting Ready for High Winds, Snow and Ice 2016-10-22 17:17:18.000 - Ben Brownell, Summit Intern   Well we have finally crossed the last few items off of our winter checklist this shift and are ready for the storm!  Some final tasks include sealing up a few windows and making sure our instruments that can't handle icing are taken down for the storm.  As I'm sure you all know our pitot tube is our primary instrument for high winds and icing events.  We are expecting to be pretty busy throughout the weekend chipping off all the ice and measuring the snow