Very cool fun in VERY cold weather…

2007-01-17 19:30:28.000 – Jim Salge,  Observer

New video below!

Conditions on the mountain the past 36 hours have been well, rather brutal. After a 30F degree drop in six hours following Monday’s storm, temperatures continued to slide through the day on Tuesday and into Tuesday night. Winds steadily increased as well, by 7AM, the observers had recorded a temperature -32F and a peak wind speed of 111mph.

Conditions were deemed too dangerous during for the typical 8AM shift change, and Brent and I found ourselves holed up in the AMC Pinkham Notch Camp enjoying a nice cup of hot chocolate until 10AM. By that time, the winds had calmed back down to hurricane force, and the temperatures no longer threatened the hydraulics of the Snowcat. The trip up the road was quite easy, as our operator Gus, in anticipation of the weather had cleared much of the route the day prior. We arrived in just over an hour, threw our stuff out, the down going crew jumped in, and away they went. No time to dawdle on days like today.

These are the coldest temperatures that we’ve seen on Mount Washington in a couple of winters, I’ll look up the last date of incidence when things calm down tomorrow. As an interesting aside, Tim Markle, former MWO staff meteorologist and current observer at the South Pole wrote to say that we were colder than him this morning…something especially rare, even with it being their “summer!”

And with that comes our new video for the week. The observatory has been working for some time in creating a special members only section to our website, as a thanks to those who support the work and research of the non-profit Mount Washington Observatory. Besides multiple webcam views, webcam movies and eventually even more weather content, we will be launching a weekly video blog. We hope through these we will be able to provide both observatory insight and stories through this new media. Nothing will be removed from the current site, but plenty more will be available to members.

However, with the launch over a week away, here’s some fantastic video that the crew put together today!

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We are working on the glitch that caused the current conditions to ‘freeze’ on the homepage during the cold snap. The data all exists in our database, but it was having difficulty being exported over the last 36 hours
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Jim Salge,  Observer