Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
It's like an ice box out there! Everyone is talking about the weather and rightfully so. It neared record low temperatures Thursday. Day # 2 of this deep freeze will be followed by Day # 3 Friday morning, where temperatures could be just as cold.
On the left you'll find two pictures. The top is courtesy NOAA and the National Weather Service in Burlington, Vermont. It's a nice look at dozens and dozens of low temperatures Thursday morning, instead of the typical map you may see on TV which shows less sites. You can nicely point out the influence of Lake Champlain on this map, indicated by the couple of numbers only dropping to around -7 or -8 near the warmer 35-degree lake. On the opposite end, those elevated valleys in the northern Adirondacks and Northeast Kingdom lived up to their cold fame by dropping to the teens and twenties below zero.
A viewer spotted his thermometer reading colder than -20 F! Thanks to Richard De Florio for sending that gem in.
Someone opened the freezer door. By freezer door I mean the polar vortex. That is a circulation which is in the northern latitudes and between the troposphere and stratosphere. We are experiencing a dip in that vortex as of January 24. It's similar to someone opening up a freezer door and letting all that cold air down to hit your feet. We never really got that last winter if you recall. It was similar to saying the freezer door was shut, keeping all that cold air to our north. I'll get into more detail on that in a following blog.
-Meteorologist Steve Glazier
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