Well, that's better!
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| Rime ice clings to trees on the Burlington, Vermont waterfront early Saturday. Steam coming off the lake during the intense cold wave Friday and Friday night froze to trees and other objects along the lake shore. |
We're waking up to a much warmer morning today than we did yesterday, when everybody was in the teens and 20s below zero. Twenty-four hours later, most of us were seeing temperatures in the teens and 20s above zero.
The swings in temperatures have been pretty amazing and extremely.
When the cold snap started, the temperature at Burlington fell from 24 degrees at midnight, at the start of February 3, to 14 below by 11 p.m. Friday. That's a drop of 38 degrees in just 23 hours.
As the cold wave bottomed out, the temperature in Burlington hovered between 14 and 15 below from Friday evening through 7 a.m. Saturday. At 7 a.m. Saturday, just before sunrise, Burlington was still at 15 below.
From there, the temperature rose and rose without interruption. by 6 a.m. this morning, it was 20 degrees in Burlington, a full 35 degrees hotter than 24 hours earlier.
The temperature will continue to climb and will be above freezing this afternoon - probably in the mid and upper 30s.
I could be jinxing things, but I'm pretty sure we won't see anything as cold as we dealt with Friday and Saturday morning until at least next winter.
The plunge in temperature was so abrupt, and coming after what has been an otherwise warm winter, caused a lot of weird things to happen.
One of them is frost quakes. This happens when water logged soil or rocks freeze fast. Sometimes they'll crack and fracture when they freeze, and you get a rumble and a little tremor. It feels just like a little earthquake.
Other people in Vermont described what sounded like gun shots in the woods. No, nobody was firing rifles to celebrate how gawd awful cold it was. The theory is sap in trees was flash freezing, expanding and causing wood in the trees to pop and break.
Don't worry. This almost definitely did not cause any substantial damage to any trees.
Besides the record lows in that Arctic blast that I described in yesterday's post, I found a few more.
The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang noted that the wind chill in Boston reached 39 below, the lowest wind chill since at least 1944. As noted yesterday, the record low temperature Saturday of 10 below in Boston was the coldest the city has seen since 1957.
Portland, Maine also had its lowest wind chill on record, at 45 below.
Nantucket's temperature got down to minus 3 which is an all time record low for them, for any date.
A main reason why southern New England was able to establish these record lows was the rather unusual nature of this cold snap. Usually, the coldest temperatures in New England come in the winter when Arctic high pressure comes in when we have a snow cover.
A clear, calm night under these conditions allows temperatures to plummet.
But those clear, calm nights don't work as well in southern New England. There's usually not as much snow on the ground, and the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean modifies the cold.
This time, strong northwest winds drove unusually cold Arctic air southward, and that overwhelmed any influence from the ocean. These windy types of intense cold snaps are pretty rare, so this set of circumstances made this cold blast a record breaker.
Video: Aftermath of all the steam, steam devils and such on Burlington's waterfront. The steam froze to nearby trees and objects. Click on this link to view or on the image below if you see it.
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