Tuesday, January 7, 2014

About the extreme cold snap in much of the United States

A few days ago, it snowed yet again at my house in Maryland. We got a few inches and then some of the roads iced over. A lot of the creeks, streams, ponds and other bodies of water froze too.

Now, we are having very, very cold temperatures accompanied by strong wind gusts. There have been negative wind chills all day today. I woke up to a temperature of 4 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. The temperature was in the negative single digits without the wind chill factored in to the west in parts of the Appalachian mountains. It was bad enough that many schools here in the Baltimore area were closed today. There has been a huge risk of hypothermia and frostbite, which I got six years ago on a winter camping trip (with temperatures way up in the 30s). I have never seen a cold snap without any precipitation like this before in my life.

This cold wave happens to coincide with the 18th anniversary of the "Blizzard of '96", which dumped multiple feet of snow in many east coast states. I was seven and a half months old when it happened, and I think I actually have a very short memory of that blizzard even though I was so young. I remember somehow having a view outside and just seeing a blanket of snow covering the whole yard. The memory is literally two seconds long and I'm not entirely sure that it was the 1996 blizzard, but I know I was very young when the memory happened.

Just under a year ago there were a couple of days where the high temperature here didn't even get up to 30 degrees and I went outside and made a video about it. Now with today's probably historic conditions, 22 degrees is nothing compared to this.

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