What a windy night!!! 1/31/13

Wow! What a windy night!  I was woken up by the wind at 4 am and couldn't get back to sleep for a while.  Southern New England experienced heavy winds for a number of hours this morning 1/31/13.  As a strong cold front moved towards the East Coast, warm air pushed up ahead of it pushing the temperatures to almost 60 in the middle of the night, in Connecticut, in January!!!  It even broke official temperature records at the two National Weather Service stations in CT, Hartford (Windsor locks) and Bridgeport (Sikorsky).  I took a screen shot from Weatherbug at 4:21 am, the temp was 55 degrees, winds 15mph with gust to 40mph and the radar at the bottom shows the intense area of rain about to move through!

Bridgeport, CT 58 new record, old record 54 (2012) 

Bridgeport, CT peak wind gust 61mph 

Also amazing was seeing the temps across the Northeast.  Yesterday I was watching the local news at noon and they showed temps across all of New England. In Watertown, NY, which is up in far northern NY by Niagara Falls, was 60 degrees, 24 hours later they are in  the 30's and getting lake effect snow!! Its always crazy to see such temperature swings, especially in the heart of winter, yet it seems to be happening more often.

Icy Long Island Sound 1/25/13

After a week of below freezing temps here along the CT shoreline, I braved the cold on Friday morning to venture down the beach and take some photos.  The reason why I wanted to get down to the beach was because the water was getting so cold, ice was forming in spots.  Now as most of you probably know, it's very hard for salt water to freeze, and Long Island Sound is salt water.  Although not too unusual it was fun to see the ice along the shoreline.  I took tons of pictures and even made a slideshow for the local weather site WxEdge.com, which I'm a contributor to.  The only part that wasn't fun was the near frostbite i received on my fingers!! It took about 20 mins to get my hands back to normal after only being outside for 15-20 mins at the most!

Here's my slideshow for WxEdge:  

Icy Shores of...Long Island Sound 

and here are two photos I took with my phone and filtered via Instagram: 

Coldest morning in years by Long Island Sound

Temps dipped down to 4 degrees this morning in downtown Milford, which is a town along the CT coast! Not the coldest morning ever but the coldest in a few years! Here's a screen cap of weather bug this morning!

Blizzard of 2005: Jan 20-23

As I checked Accuweather.com site this morning for any news on the possible snowstorm tonight in Southern New England I was disappointed to find that the NORLUN trough (which will bring the most accumulating snow) will be up near Boston, if not in Maine.  However before I switched to another website I noticed a snow map on the side of the page. It's the same one I have posted below.  It is the Blizzard of 2005 from January 20-23.  It's nice that Accuweather posts historic storms in the side banners, especially since I remember this storm pretty well.

The reason why I remember this blizzard so well is because I missed it completely!!!  Although my home town in southwestern CT saw between 16-24 inches of snow, I was living in Vermont at the time at Lyndon State College, where we saw nothing more than a few flurries!!  This was very disappointing for me to watch (and study in class) the storm moving through southern New England, as my parents shoveled out and I just sat in the cold semi overcast fringe of the storm.  The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont didn't see much snow that year.  So when I saw this map posted on Accuweather  I flashed right back to sitting in my dorm room watching the reports of heavy snow in my hometown while it was just cold outside.  Even on the map you can see that the accumulating snow didn't get much farther north than White River Junction (Lyndon State was just north of St. Johnsbury.

Winter in the Garden!

My Rosemary Plant covered in snow

Cold, Cold Morning!!!! 1/3/13

According to Weatherbug, it's only 11 degrees out!!! Not the coldest temps for the CT shoreline but pretty close!!

Winter at the beach! 1/2/13

Winter Sky 1/2/13