Now comes the hard part.
After days of dangerously cold weather, an arctic air mass began building over the region overnight, plunging State College into a frigid free fall.
The temperature fell steadily through the night, standing at eight degrees below zero just before 6 a.m. Friday. That ties the all-time low for this date.
The wind chills are making it feel much worse than it is — about 29 degrees below zero. A wind chill warning, issued by the National Weather Service, remains in effect until noon Friday.
Because of the intense cold, the State College Area School District decided to close schools on Friday. That’s a reversal of a plan to open on a two hour delay that was first announced Thursday evening.
And weather conditions are not going to improve much in the days ahead.
“It’s going to be cold. It’s not going to warm up a whole lot [Friday],” says AccuWeather Meteorologist Mike Doll. “We’re looking at 10 for a high. The good news is that winds won’t be quite as strong as yesterday. That said, it’s going to be 15 to 25 below this morning and 5 to 15 below this afternoon.”
The brutal cold has been with us for the entire month of February. The first 10 days of the month, there were some below average days and some above average. Since Feb. 10, Doll describes the weather conditions as “abnormally cold.”
“Since February 10th there have been well below average temperatures each day,” he says. “From the 10th thru the 19th our departure from normal has been 16.2 below average.”
Looking ahead, AccuWeather is calling for more extreme cold Friday night with a low of one below zero. The record of two below zero was set in 1968.
And then comes the snow. “We do have snow arriving Saturday probably before mid-morning,” Doll predicts. “It’s going to go pretty much continuously through the day. Roads will become slick with hazardous travel conditions.
There could also be some sleet and freezing rain Saturday night. By the time the storm moves out we could see three to six inches of fresh snow. Temperatures will begin to rise, reaching a high of 37 on Sunday. But then the cold weather returns.
“The next cold front moving through will drop temperatures Sunday night, for a low of two degrees Sunday and we’re probably going to see a high in the mid-teens on Monday,” says Doll.
And there is simply no relief in sight. “We’re not seeing any change in the weather pattern that suggests a pattern of near normal temperatures coming up, certainly not next week,” says Doll.
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