Marty on a Coaster

2014-12-02 13:19:11.000 – Caleb Meute, Summit Intern

Random question: Have you been on a roller coaster this week? I’m not trying to make anyone jealous, but Marty and all of us observers have been on one this entire week up here on the summit of Mount Washington. It hasn’t been your average roller coaster with corkscrews and grown men screaming, but it has been a roller coaster of temperatures. When we got up here to the summit last Wednesday, the temperatures were in the lower 30s. Thursday and into Friday the temperatures fell and hit their low of 6 degrees below zero Friday night. On Saturday, the temperatures began to rise and this continued through Monday morning when they were steady in the mid-30s. If you are not dizzy yet, you are about to be. This morning the temperatures fell back into the lower single digits and as I am writing this just before noon, they have risen to 20 degrees. If I wasn’t a meteorologist and I didn’t pay attention to forecasts AND I lived on the summit of Mount Washington, this would have been one seriously confusing week.

 

To explain it purely with numbers, our maximum temperature this week was Sunday night into Monday morning when the mercury rose to 36 degrees. Our minimum temperature was reached Friday night when it bottomed out at a chilly 6 degrees below zero. The biggest temperature swing occurred on Monday when the mercury fell 33 degrees, from 36 degrees to 3 degrees in that 24 hour period. To compare that to an actual roller coaster, I would say that would be the equivalent to an 800 foot drop. That would exceed Kingda Ka’s 418 foot drop, which is the largest drop of any roller coaster in the world, by a whopping 382 feet. It is no joke up here on the summit of Mount Washington.

Footnote: There is no scientific credibility to the previous comparison. Kindga Ka remains superior.

Caleb Meute, Summit Intern