Massena, New York broke its daily temperature Saturday, reaching 50 degrees (previous record = 45 degrees in 1988).
The bigger news is Mount Washington, New Hampshire broke its all-time January record high temperature Sunday.
Sorry Massena, this one takes the cake this weekend.
The warmest it has ever gotten (on record) on top of New England's tallest piece of land was 47 degrees in 1995. On Sunday the 13th of January 2013 it reached 48 degrees. It also happened between 5-6 a.m. Sunday. Then it slowly got cooler through the day.
The January thaw we've been going through was hitting the mountains just as hard. I heard a lot of reports of 'temperature inversions' during the weekend from friends and viewers. The warm air (coming all the way from the Gulf of Mexico) rose up over the colder, more dense air near the surface (near the snow covered ground). This created what is known as an 'inversion' where the temperature actually gets warmer as you go up in elevation. It doesn't happen often, but this was a classic scenario this weekend.
Now the thaw is over, and we'll be returning to a colder end to January. The Climate Prediction Center's forecast calls for a greater chance of below average temperatures through the 27th of January. The long-range and reliable weather models I have looked at agree with this.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/814day/814temp.new.gif
All pictures courtesy the Mount Washington Observatory
http://mountwashington.org/weather/
-Meteorologist Steve Glazier
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