Warm Up Ahead

2013-01-27 23:34:44.000 – Mike Carmon,  Weather Observer/Meteorologist

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It’s hard to believe what’s in the forecast.

When we arrived on the summit nearly four-and-a-half days ago, the thermometer read a frosty 35 degrees below zero F. Wind chills were somewhere around 85 below F, and exposed skin while outdoors was absolutely forbidden.

Now, an inexplicable warming trend is in the cards, with temperatures expected to rise above freezing on Tuesday, and readings approaching 40 degrees F possible on Wednesday!The recent stretch of relatively precipitation-free weather, which often comes with such an arctic cold snap due to the lack of moisture in the air, has given us only .8 inches of snow over the past four days–a laughably-tiny number for late January, in a location that averages almost 53 inches of snow over the month, and nearly 300 inches of the white stuff per year!

This is about to change as well, although not in a wintry sense.

With the temperatures slated to skyrocket as I mentioned earlier, it looks as though a wintry mix on Tuesday will transition to a mostly rain event on Wednesday. This will most likely diminish the already feeble snow pack that exists on the summit.

What a topsy-turvy winter it’s been!

Mike Carmon,  Weather Observer/Meteorologist