East Coast locked in wickedly cold weekend of sub-zero temps
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A man crosses E. Washington St. in downtown Syracuse, N.Y. Friday, Jan. 5, 2018. Frigid temperatures, some that felt as cold as minus 30 degrees, moved across the East Coast on Friday as the region dug out from a massive winter storm that brought more than a foot of snow, hurricane-force winds and coastal flooding a day earlier.
NEW YORK >> The snowstorm that hit the East Coast with frigid, wind-whipped whiteness and ice seems to pick a different bull’s eye target each day.
On Saturday, wind chill warnings from Virginia to Vermont hit Burlington, Vermont, with a temperature of minus 1 and a wind chill of minus 30. Both Philadelphia and New York were shivering at 8 degrees, with wind chills of minus 11 in Philadelphia and minus 9 in New York.
And in Hartford, Connecticut, a brutal cold of 10 degrees yielded a wind chill of minus 20. The coldest high for Hartford — 9 degrees — was set in 1912.
These locations, however, will have nothing on the White Mountains in New Hampshire. The Mount Washington Observatory, on its website, predicted that the mountain’s highest summits could see wind chills of minus 100 degrees into Saturday. At 6 a.m. Saturday, it tied with Armstrong, Ontario, as the second coldest place in the world at minus 36.
The cold conditions will last most of the weekend, but Monday expects to be the first day above freezing since last month. In New York City, according to the National Weather Bureau, temperatures should reach 40 degrees next week.
Even more locations won’t escape the cold; the mercury should be dipping into the single digits in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., during the weekend, about 20 degrees below normal for this time of year.
The blast of cold air, which comes just days after a storm dumped as much as 18 inches (46 centimeters) of snow in some places, could bring the feeling of real jaw-clenching temperatures to people living further north.
The National Weather Service said Friday that temperatures in the Berkshire mountains in western Massachusetts could seem like a frosty minus 35 degrees, parts of New Hampshire and Maine could experience minus 45 and Vermont’s mountain regions could feel like minus 50 degrees.
“It’s definitely cold and the type of bone-chilling cold that happens every few years,” said Dan Hofmann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Baltimore. He added that the last time such extreme cold occurred was in February 2015.
The weather service issued wind chill warnings for various days this weekend for parts of Vermont, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Maine and New Hampshire.
Fast forward to early next week, though, and more seasonable weather across the region is expected to return with temperatures in the high 30s and near 40s.
