Wunderground.com - 1/23/13, By Dr. Jeff Masters
A classic January North American cold wave continues to bring bitter cold to much of Eastern Canada and the Midwest and Northeast U.S., and heavy lake effect snows to the shores of the Great Lakes. The intense cold was centered near the Ontario/Quebec border this Wednesday morning, where a numbingly low temperature of -45°F (-43°C) was observed at Rouyn, Quebec. The 2 mph wind created a wind chill of -54°F (-48°C). One other station in Canada, Pointe Claveau, Quebec also reported a wind chill of -54°F, thanks to a temperature of -19°F (-28°C) and a wind of 38 mph. In the U.S., below-zero temperatures were recorded Wednesday morning in eleven states east of the Rockies. The coldest air was centered over Northern Maine, where the temperature plummeted to -36°F (-37°C) at Estcourt Station. No doubt the most fun place to be in all of North America this morning was on top of Mt. Washington, New Hampshire, where the temperature of -35°F (-37°C) combined with a wind of 69 mph to create a truly astonishing wind chill of -85°F (-65°C)!
The weather was a bit less extreme, but nonetheless notably cold, in Washington DC, which bottomed out at 15°F this morning--the coldest it has been there in nearly four years, since March 3, 2009. DC hit a high of just 32°F on Tuesday--the first high temperature of 32° or below in DC since January 22, 2012. The forecast calls for DC to remain below freezing for a 6-day period. According to Ian Livingston of the Capital Weather Gang, the last time D.C. had more than four consecutive days below freezing was during the winter of 2004 - 2005, when the city had a 6-day below-freezing streak. Here in Southeast Michigan where I live, it got below zero for the first time in nearly two years on Tuesday. During my late afternoon cross-country ski adventure on the frozen lake that I live by, I alternated between marveling at the beauty of the swirling "snow devils" kicked up by the gusts of 20 mph, and quailing before their brutal impact in the 7°F cold. I prefer it about 20° warmer for my cross-country ski adventures, thank you!
Figure 1. True-color MODIS satellite image of Tuesday's lake effect snowstorms taken at 3:20 pm EST January 22, 2013. The most concentrated band of snow was affecting the east shore of Lake Ontario (far right of image) near Oswego, New York. Up to 32" of snow fell in 24 hours in this band. Note the thin streaks of snow to the southwest of Lake Michigan in north central Illinois. According the the National Weather Service in Chicago, these bands of snow were lake-effect induced, but not from Lake Michigan--the snow was due to cold air flowing over warm waters in power plant cooling ponds. Image credit: NASA.
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