US East Coast deep freeze hits 100m

With wind chill close to minus 100 Mount Washington vies for world’s coldest place

About 100 million people faced a new challenge after the whopping East Coast snowstorm: a gusty deep freeze, topped Saturday by a wind chill close to minus 100 on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington that vied for world’s coldest place.

Jaw-clenching temperatures to start the weekend throughout the Northeast hit Burlington, Vermont, at minus 1 and a wind chill of minus 30. Both Philadelphia and New York were shivering at 8 degrees.

And in Hartford, Connecticut, a brutal cold of 10 degrees yielded a wind chill of minus 20.

On Saturday, winds of more than 90 mph swirled Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak, at a temperature of minus 37 degrees and a wind chill of minus 93. It tied for second place with Armstrong, Ontario, as the coldest spot in the world.

The bitter cold that followed the massive East Coast snowstorm should begin to ease as temperatures inch up and climb past freezing this week, weather forecasters said yesterday.

Patrick Burke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said temperatures yesterday could hit record lows from South Carolina to Maine. But he said the wind won’t be as punishing as it was on Friday and Saturday.

“With the wind dying down it will probably feel significantly better although many of these areas will still be below freezing,” Burke said.

The bitter cold should begin to ease as temperatures inch up and climb past freezing this week, weather forecasters say

A nchorage, Alaska, was warmer last week than Jacksonville, Florida. The weather in the US is that upside down. That’s because the Arctic’s deeply frigid weather escaped its regular atmospheric jail that traps the worst cold. It then meandered south to the central and eastern US. And this has been happening more often in recent times.

So why is it so cold?

Super cold air is normally locked up in the Arctic in the polar vortex, a gigantic circular weather pattern around the North Pole. A strong polar vortex keeps that cold air hemmed in. “Then when it weakens, it causes like a dam to burst,” and the cold air heads south, said Judah Cohen, a winter storm expert for Atmospheric Environmental Research. “This is not record-breaking for Canada or Alaska or northern Siberia, it’s just misplaced,” said Cohen, who had forecast a colder than normal winter for much of the United States.

Is this unusual?

Yes, but more for how long — about 10 days — the cold has lasted, than how cold it has been. On Tuesday, Boston tied its seven-day record for the most consecutive days at or below 20 degrees that was set exactly 100 years ago. More than 1,600 daily records for cold were tied or broken in the last week of December, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For Greg Carbin of the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Centre, the most meaningful statistics are how last week’s average temperature was the second coldest in more than a century of recordkeeping for Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and Kansas City, third coldest in Pittsburgh and fifth coldest in New York City.

Is it just in the US?

Pretty much. While the US has been in the deep freeze, the rest of the globe has been toastier than normal. The globe as a whole was 0.9 degrees (0.5 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal on Tuesday and the Arctic was more than 6 degrees warmer than normal (3.4 degrees Celsius).

So what’s next?

The cold could actually worsen for much of the East Coast this weekend because of a monster storm that’s brewing in the Atlantic and Caribbean, what meteorologists are calling a “snow hurricane” or “bomb cyclone.” But forecasters don’t think the storm will hit the East Coast, keeping most of the snow and worst winds over open ocean, although parts of the Northeast are still likely to get high winds, waves and some snow. “For the Northeast, this weekend might be the coldest of the coldest with the storm,” said Jason Furtado, a University of Oklahoma meteorology professor.

What makes the Polar Vortex move?

Climate change hasn’t made the polar vortex more extreme, but it probably is making it move more, which makes the weather seem more extreme, Furtado said. A recent study by Potsdam Institute climate scientist Marlene Kretschmer found the polar vortex has weakened and meandered more often since 1990, but that study focused more on Europe. There seems to be a similar connection for more frequent Arctic cold snaps like what the US is now experiencing, Kretschmer said.

How can it be so cold with global warming?

Don’t confuse weather — which is a few days or weeks in one region — with climate, which is over years and decades and global. “A few cold days doesn’t disprove climate change,” Furtado said.