This is just a quick post to let all my readers know that starting tomorrow after I get off the mountain, I will be going on vacation. I am taking one shift off. The cool thing about the week on week off schedule that I work is that taking one shift week off ends up giving me 3 weeks off. I have my usual week off, then my shift off, then another usual week off.

I will be spending the majority of my time off in State College, PA, my hometown and headquarters of AccuWeather.com. I will get the opportunity to help coach my former high school soccer team just like I have done for the 5 years previous to this; I am very excited about that.

My posts will be a bit more sparse during this time, but rest assured I will be posting. I have a few entries in mind that will be good to post while I am away from the mountain itself. I have been getting a lot of requests for more pictures of our mascot Marty the cat, so that is one post that will happen in the near future. I also have lots of other pictures that I have taken the last couple weeks that I will be putting in a post soon.

Right now I am a little more anxious than usual to get off the mountain. Naturally one reason is to start my vacation (I haven't had anything more than my usual time off since I started here full time over a year ago), but another reason is the weather. This is honestly one of the ugliest , most boring, and most obnoxious weeks of weather I have ever seen up here. All week we have either been in the clouds, or at best in and out of the clouds. Temperatures have remained remarkably steady in the upper 40's to low 50's. Winds have been exceptionally calm and probably the most striking statistic from this past week: 6.98 inches of rain was measured, 4.86 inches of that falling in August. That is over half the monthly rainfall for August in four days! So, as you can imagine, in addition to all the other things I mentioned about this week that have made the weather miserable, the amount of rain certainly contributed as well.

Hopefully I don't miss anything exciting in my time away from the mountain!

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I mean to write about this yesterday, but it got very busy here last night as we had some special guests up for the night. The guests were here because of a connection with one of our biggest corporate sponsors, Subaru. We hosted a father and three of his daughters; the fathers name is Giancarlo Esposito. He is a producer/director and actor who has been in quite a wide range of TV shows and movies. You can check out all he has been in at IMDB.com. He actually has a major film coming out soon that he directed, called Gospel Hill(WIKI) which has a pretty impressive cast. We found the trailer on YouTube yesterday and it looks very interesting. I know this is really off-topic, but they were a really nice family and a pleasure to have spend a night with us up here. You would have never known he was a big time Hollywood person.

Now on to the actual topic of this entry. I wrote about the anniversary of Hot Saturday just this past Saturday. After posting that entry, I got to wondering what kind of large scale (known as synoptic scale in the meteorology world) setup caused that intense heat wave in New England. So, I looked up the surface weather map from that day, August 1, 1975. Here it is(click on it for a full size image):

So, as you can see, a very broad area of high pressure was centered over the Mid-Atlantic. The clockwise rotation around this high would have been responsible for transporting the very hot air into New England. The fact that the high was centered over the Mid-Atlantic is likely what prevented any extremely hot temperatures in that region. The bigger of the maps shows surface observations for 7 a.m. on that day. These observations show upper 60's and low 70s for the Mid-Atlantic while temperatures in parts of New England are already well into the 80s. From what I can see, Boston is reporting 88 while Portland, Maine is reporting 84, at 7 a.m.!

Perhaps a more interesting contrast than between New England and the Mid-Atlantic is the contrast between New England and the southeast. The map actually shows temperatures in the low to mid 70s all the way down into Florida. That is a solid 10 to 15 degrees cooler than many locations in New England!

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Today is the anniversary what is known as Hot Saturday in New England. On August 2, 1975 and the days surrounding that date, New England was gripped by an extremely intense heat wave. Temperatures across the region soared well past the century mark and set all time records for many stations that still stand to this day.

Here are some of the highs set on that day at some stations around New England(thanks to my dad, Ken Clark, for pulling up this data using the AccuWeather climate database that I unfortunately do not have access too). All of these are at least daily record highs for August 2. An asterisk denotes an all time record high:

Boston, MA: 102 (tied for 2nd all time)
Portland, ME: 103*
Providence, RI: 104*
Bangor, ME:102 (3rd all time)
Burlington, VT: 99(tied for 3rd all time)
Pease Air Force Base (Portsmouth), NH: 102*
Concord, NH: 101 (tied for 2nd all time)

It should also be noted that Providence is the only station out of the ones I listed that has August 2, 1975 as the only occurrence of that all time record high temperature. Portland saw a temperature of 103 on one other occasion, July 4, 1911. Pease Air Force Base saw 102 on two other occasions, July 22, 1926 and August 10, 1949. It seems that early July 1911 was also very hot in New England; both Boston and Concord hit their all time record highs during that time period.

Mount Washington is another stations whose all time record high occurred on August 2, 1975. A temperature of 72.2 degrees was recorded on that day. There is one other day that a temperature of 72 degrees was recorded (72.1 degrees to be exact) and that was June 26, 2003. I am sure that many people are surprised to find out that we have never recorded a temperature exceeding 72.2 degrees in the 76 years we have been taking observations here on the summit. However, remember that our average annual temperature is a very chilly 27 degrees.

Today is also interesting for the mountain because it is the only day that we have recorded what is called a cooling degree day. A cooling degree day is a way to measure how much energy it will take to cool a home or business. Conversely, a heating degree day is used to measure how much energy it will take for heating purposes. To determine cooling or heating degree days, one must first find the average temperature for the day. Using August 2, 1975 on Mount Washington as an example, the maximum for that day was 72 degrees as we already discussed, while the minimum was 60. Averaging the max and min gives an average temperature for the day of 66 degrees.

Now, heating and cooling degree days are based off of an average daily temperature of 65 degrees. For this example, an average temperature of 66 degrees means there was 1 cooling degree day. If the average temperature for the day had been 40 degrees, then that would mean there was 25 heating degree days.

To be honest, heating and cooling degree days means nothing to your average person these days. In fact, it is likely that this value will be phased out of weather records in the relatively near future. However, I still find it interesting that there has only been 1 cooling degree day in our record of temperature on Mount Washington.

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Ok, so time for the final update on any snow left in Tuckerman Ravine. First a review of my guesses for when the snow would finally disappear:

Tuckerman Ravine snow no longer visible from webcam: July 23

Tuckerman Ravine loses all snow: August 3

Now here is a series of images from the Ravine webcam, part of our webcam network. This first one is from July 22, where there is still a very small amount of snow still visible (I circled the two spots in yellow):

Now here is a shot from the next day that the mountain was out of the fog and the ravine was viewable from the webcam. This shot is from July 25 and again, the visible spots of snow are circled in yellow:

The last webcam shot is from the next morning, July 26, when it appears that both specks of white have dissapeared:

Ok, so the 25th turns out to be the last day that snow was visible from the webcams, so my guess of the 23rd was actually a couple days too early.

Now here is a shot taken of one of our summer interns, Natalie, while she was hiking up through the ravine for Seek-the-Peak (our annual hike-a-thon fundraiser):

So obviously, even though there was no more snow visible from the webcam, there was still some left on the 26th. Today however, my fellow observer Steve (from the opposite shift) hiked up through the ravine with his son and reported that there was no snow left anymore. So sometime between the 26th and August 1st, the last bit of snow melted out, leaving my guess of August 3rd incorrect by at least a few days.

The good news, at least for me as a snow lover, is that we are only one to two months away from getting our first significant measurable snowfall (September has seen snowfall of several inches as recent as 2002). So it wont be long until the ravine starts to fill up with snow for another season!

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This week is going to a bit of a change for me. I am working the overnight shift this week, which is not typical for me. My fellow observer, Ryan, who is the typical night observer, is taking a half a shift of vacation and will be leaving the mountain on Saturday. So, rather than do a half a week of days and then torture myself by switching over to nights all of sudden, I will just be doing nights all week.

Now remember that we are a 24 hour a day, 365 day a year, manual observation station. While a lot of places around the country now have automated stations, especially for the overnight hours, we do not because of the unique environment up here. There always needs to be someone watching the instruments and gathering the data for the observations since some of the variables we observe (such as sky cover, sky condition, and visibility) are all manually assessed. Like I always tell people, while you are with your family eating Thanksgiving dinner, or opening presents on Christmas morning, or celebrating the start of a new year, there is someone up here on Mount Washington taking observations.

So my shift this week will run from 6:30 p.m. To 6:30 a.m. Not only is the timing of the shift very different, the work is very different. There are no tours, very few phone calls, and it is just me in the weather room from about 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. It is a nice change for me though. Back in April I did nights for a shift week while Ryan was on vacation and I enjoyed the change of pace then too.

Perhaps the thing that is most difficult for me to adjust to is simply doing the observations while it is dark outside. One has to let their eyes adjust for several minutes in order to begin to determine exactly what kind of cloud cover there is. That is of course assuming that we are not in the fog.

Tonight has been particularly interesting. It has been unexpectedly clear out, which of course completely went against what I forecasted. Just goes to show that sometimes this mountain will do what it wants, when it wants. It is too bad that it was not this nice early this afternoon when I had planned on hiking across the ridge to the other side of Mt. Jefferson to meet up with a friend of mine who is part of the Randolph Mountain Club trail crew. Oh well, I digress. Back to the weather this evening. Not only has it been clear, but it has also been remarkably calm. For a period of time last hour, wind speeds were at or below 1 mph and our 3-cup anemometer came to a complete stop. Of course, I have seen this happen up here before, but as you would expect for a place that averages about 35 mph for an annual wind speed, it is quite rare. Experiencing such a calm wind at night with the stars out makes the experience that much better.

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