Looking back at November

2009-12-05 10:40:06.000 – Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist

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Things have been a little ‘off’ this shift. For starters, Marty the cat hasn’t been around because he went down the mountain on Wednesday to go see the vet. Luckily it’s nothing too serious; he has been scratching and licking his back excessively and this has caused it to become a bit raw. He has been staying with the other shift’s intern, Mary Ellen, and will be returning to the summit today. Also, Ryan, who usually works the overnight shift of observations, is on vacation this shift. In his absence, Mike Finnegan and I have been working very different shift than usual. I work from midnight to noon and Mike works from noon to midnight. This way, both of us are up for part of the day (so we can communicate and work with valley staff) and I am still able to do Distance Learning programs.

Normally after the end of a month, Ryan likes to write a comment summarizing the weather data for the month that has just passed. Since he won’t be back until December 16, I figured I would take an opportunity to do that in his stead. Ryan is good at finding a way to creatively express this data. Unfortunately, I am not, so I will be presenting November’s weather data in a much more factual (and probably boring) way.

If you live in the northeast, it is no mystery that November was a very warm month. Here on the mountain the average temperature for the month was 27.7 degrees, which is a whopping 7.1 degrees above average. The highest temperature recorded for the month was 48 degrees and the lowest was 5. Despite that very high deviation from average, only one daily record high was broken (47 degrees on the 14th) and one was equaled (48 degrees on the 15th). There were several other days that we came within just a few degrees of tying or breaking a daily record.

Snowfall for the month was 32.0 inches and liquid precipitation totaled 8.11 inches. Those numbers are 8.8 inches and 2.38 inches below normal, respectively. Those numbers are also very deceiving too. As of the 26th of the month, a paltry 5.5 inches of snow had been measured along with 3.87 inches of liquid. The coastal storm that pounded the summit last weekend added 24.4 inches of snow in just two days.

Of course, I wouldn’t dream of leaving out some statistics about the wind for November. Overall, it was a rather calm month with an average wind speed of 32.9 mph, 12.3 mph below average. The peak wind gust was 137 mph on the 28th, during the same storm that brought all the snow I just mentioned. This also happens to be the highest wind recorded since March of 2008.

There is a lot more I could share with you, but those are the most interesting statistics. If you’re interested in more, you can always look at our monthly F6 records.

Brian Clark,  Observer and Meteorologist