WATERTOWN - Never mind the towering snow banks: At Watertown Airport, under a clear sky with hardly a rustle of wind, the mercury plunged to 35 degrees below zero just before dawn Monday.
“We sure don't like to open the door very often,” said airport mechanic Matt McCarthy, 43, who in the depths of winter works mostly inside the hangar. And yet the airport's record-low mark didn't seem nearly as numbing to him as some of those snowy days over the last two weeks when the wind picked up.
“It was cold today, you wanted to move along,” he said. “But it wasn't like you had a 10 mile-an-hour wind blowing on you either. That wind just cuts through you like a knife.”
The eastern shore of Lake Ontario has been pounded by the elements this month, with lake-effect squalls burying its many small communities under six to 12 feet of snow. “You kind of get used to it after two or three weeks, but it wears on you after a while,” McCarthy said.
Arctic air knifed through the region early Monday, sending the temperatures dipping to minus 10 to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
But in a few isolated spots near the lake - the airport is located in Dexter about 10 miles west of the city of Watertown - the cold deepened as frigid air flowed down from Canada across the St. Lawrence River valley, National Weather Service meteorologist Tony Ansuini said.
“This is just a localized phenomenon” created by a high-pressure system, deep snow and an absence of wind and cloud cover,“ Ansuini said.
“If they had a blanket of cloud cover, they would never have gotten temperatures that cold - it would have been too insulated. But with the clear skies, they had really good radiational cooling, especially with all that snow cover on the ground up there.”
The coldest temperature ever officially recorded in New York state was minus 52 degrees at Old Forge in the Adirondacks on Feb. 18, 1979, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
After more than two weeks of frigid days across upstate New York, warmer air will sweep east across the state Tuesday, pushing temperatures into the mid-30s, the National Weather Service said.
“It was cold today, you wanted to move along,” he said. “But it wasn't like you had a 10 mile-an-hour wind blowing on you either. That wind just cuts through you like a knife.”
The eastern shore of Lake Ontario has been pounded by the elements this month, with lake-effect squalls burying its many small communities under six to 12 feet of snow. “You kind of get used to it after two or three weeks, but it wears on you after a while,” McCarthy said.
Arctic air knifed through the region early Monday, sending the temperatures dipping to minus 10 to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
But in a few isolated spots near the lake - the airport is located in Dexter about 10 miles west of the city of Watertown - the cold deepened as frigid air flowed down from Canada across the St. Lawrence River valley, National Weather Service meteorologist Tony Ansuini said.
“This is just a localized phenomenon” created by a high-pressure system, deep snow and an absence of wind and cloud cover,“ Ansuini said.
“If they had a blanket of cloud cover, they would never have gotten temperatures that cold - it would have been too insulated. But with the clear skies, they had really good radiational cooling, especially with all that snow cover on the ground up there.”
The coldest temperature ever officially recorded in New York state was minus 52 degrees at Old Forge in the Adirondacks on Feb. 18, 1979, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
After more than two weeks of frigid days across upstate New York, warmer air will sweep east across the state Tuesday, pushing temperatures into the mid-30s, the National Weather Service said.
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