Awfully Cold Here, But Warm In Much Of The Rest Of The World

Lots of steam billows from the McNeil Woodfired Electric generating plant
in Burlington, Vermont as temperatures sank to record lows this morning.

Boy, this Thanksgiving cold wave really is one for the record books here in New England.

I have to go back to, I think, to late November and early December 1989 to find a cold snap of this early season intensity.

Lots of record lows were set. Particularly record low daily "high" temperatures for the date.  Burlington, Vermont only reached a so-called high temperature of 14 degrees on Thanksgiving. The previous record low high for the date was 22 degrees, so we shattered that record.

Other record low "highs" were 14 in Plattsburgh and an astonishingly chilly 8 degrees in Montpelier. Back in Burlington, it was the coldest Thanksgiving Day on record, too. The previous record was 19 on November 24, 1938.

Morning record lows on Thanksgiving in southern New England included 7 in Worcester, Massachusetts, 9 in Hartford, Connecticut and Providence was 15 degrees.

Worcester, with a maximum reading Thursday of 16 degrees and Hartford, at 21 degrees, set all time records for the coldest maximum temperature of any November day on record.  Portland, Maine also had it's coldest November high temperature on record.

More record lows are being set this morning. Overnight it was 19 below in Saranac Lake, New York. Burlington, Vermont has so far gotten to 1 above, exceeding the record low for the date, which had been 2 above. 

Also this morning, Albany, New York had a new record low of 4 above, Glens Falls had a record low of 3 and Poughkeepsie had a record low of 6.

It will warm up to seasonable levels over the weekend. Today will still be super cold, but not as bad as yesterday.

We do have to be careful with this warmup later Saturday and Saturday night. Rain is expected to move in to northern New England, but the ground got so cold during this bitter snap that rain might freeze to pavement and other surfaces even if the air temperature is a bit above freezing.  I suspect the National Weather Service might issue winter weather advisories for parts of the region Saturday night.

We will get our thaw, amid periodic rain Sunday and Monday, so some or even much of the snow in the valleys will melt.

But it's back to "Snovember" Tuesday and Wednesday as snow and snow showers move in. At least during next week, it won't be nearly as cold as it's been in the past couple days.

WARM ELSEWHERE

Yearly temperature departure from normal of Octobers on
Planet Earth since 1880. Blue is cooler than normal, red is
warmer than normal. Notice a trend?

New England yesterday was the coldest place on the planet, if you are looking at how far everyone's temperature was below or above normal. In fact, most of the world was warmer than normal yesterday.

New England has been pretty much trapped in generally cooler than normal conditions since the second half of October, but that certainly hasn't been the case for most of Planet Earth.

October overall was the second warmest on record for the world, according to NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information.   Only 2015 was warmer. The only places that were chilly were central and eastern Canada, parts of the northern United States, and to a lesser extent, China.

The hottest places in October, relative to average, were Siberia and Alaska. Go figure.

So far, January through October, 2018 is the fourth hottest year on record. The previous three years, 2015-2017 were the only years that were toastier for the Earth as a whole.