Mount Washington got some bad-weather bragging rights Friday morning when it hit 35 degrees below zero, giving it the second-lowest temperature on Earth and by far the lowest wind chill – registered at the respected website Weather Extremes.
The Mount Washington Observatory noted the reading, taken at 6:40 a.m. Friday, on its website – followed by a request for a year-end donation to support its mission tracking and studying what it calls the world’s worst weather.
Its ambient air temperature was beaten only at Watson Lake in the Canadian Yukon, which registered a frigid minus 40 degrees – but that site had calm winds, compared to the 75 mph gusts on Mount Washington. No other place in the site’s list of 10 coldest places – all in North America, including Greenland – had winds faster than 6 mph.
While you can’t say for certain that Mount Washington had the second-coldest temperature on Earth at that moment because the website depends on data being sent in, it may well have had the lowest wind chill.
It was certainly colder than the South Pole, which is in the midst of summer and saw its Friday morning temperatures at a balmy 10 below zero. Sites reporting from Siberia had warmer-than-usual temperatures.
From Thursday through today, Canada and the upper half of the U.S. were in the grip of a “polar vortex,” in which air shifts south from the Arctic due to changes in the jet stream. Those changes helped warm up Siberia.
Our temperatures are expected to return to seasonal by Sunday.
On its Observer Comments blog, the Mount Washington Observatory said this is the second-coldest December reading in its history, missing a 1993 reading by just 1 degree.
David Brooks