A “dangerously cold wind chill” broke temperature records across New England and New York Saturday morning, with temperatures dropping into the double-digit negatives and forecasters warning frostbite can set in within minutes.
The temperature in Boston plummeted to a bone-chilling minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit early Saturday morning, smashing a daily temperature record dating back to 1886, according to the National Weather Service, which reported the record cold on Saturday was the first double-digit negative temperature since 1957.
It was one of a handful of cities across New England to break a daily temperature record, including Hartford (minus 9 degrees), Providence (minus 9) and Worcester, Massachusetts (minus 13).
Albany, New York, meanwhile, tied a daily record set in 1978, at minus 13 degrees—the coldest day in the city, where the wind chill (how cold the temperature feels when wind gusts are taken into consideration) dropped to a numbing minus 34, since 2016.
Syracuse, New York, came close to a daily record, with the temperature falling to minus 13 degrees, just two degrees away from the record.
The peak of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington—which has garnered a reputation for its intense cold and wind—set a wind chill record at an astounding minus 109 degrees Fahrenheit, with the temperature dipping as low as minus 45 degrees Saturday morning, five degrees shy of an all-time state record. Forecasters with the National Weather Service had warned on Friday the historic low temperatures could cause frostbite in “as little as 10 minutes” as “unusually cold” wind chill set in, to as low as minus 65 degrees in northern Maine and into the minus 40s in Portland, Maine—the city’s coldest wind chill values in more than 20 years.
Wind chill warnings remain in effect in nearly all of New England and New York, while wind chill advisories are in place in southern Connecticut, southern and western New York and northeast Pennsylvania, with temperatures between 10 and 30 degrees below average, according to the National Weather Service.
The blast of Arctic air comes less than a week after parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana were blasted by an unseasonably cold ice storm, knocking out power for more than 500,000 homes and businesses. By comparison, less than 20,000 are without power in New York and New England combined as of Saturday morning, according to poweroutage.us, while more than 131,000 still lack power in Texas.
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