The event of the season - 2 days of hell!

[DavisStraight]

30 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

Sometimes a home heating system can’t keep up or if the home has poor insulation.   I think the water supply lines to our washing machine might be frozen.  Where they are is poorly insulated based on my looking at the situation.  

Houses with crawl spaces are notorious for pipes freezing in this cold weather, actually had it happen to a rental house I owned, ended up insulating more and wrapped the pipes with a heating cord.

[wxeyeNH]

35 minutes ago, weathafella said:

So I’m this day and age, how does a home’s pipes freeze without losing power?  Or are those reports from homes that did lose it?

Last night at -20F we ran the oil heat and the wood stove.  Even with that our pipe in the kitchen that leads to the ice maker and to the outdoor faucet froze.  It still is frozen.  With the crazy wind and sub zero temperatures the cold air was coming in everywhere.  I guess that is expected in a 230 year old restored New England cape.  

[HoarfrostHubb]

A guy I know took this today. Not sure where it was taken but I will ask. Nice hole punch!

Mass Pike    Framingham MA

[TauntonBlizzard2013]

Furnace kept up just fine here, even after losing power for an hour. Not that surprising though, house is only 5 years old and we’ll insulated.

 

I did have kind of a disaster brewing today though. Sump pump and water softener line dumps into a ditch behind my property. noticed fresh standing water in my yard this morning. Ditch had froze and water was backing up the pipe, and freezing. Pipe cracked and water leaching into the yard. Had to chip away at ice in the ditch to open up the discharge pipe. As soon as I got through the ice with a tiny hole, water started gushing out over the ice, and water in yard drained back down through broken piece of pipe.

Never had an issue until yesterday, as there has always been enough flow to keep enough of the ditch open to discharge the water. Nothing to really do about it though, at least not when it’s a once a decade event.

[8611Blizz]

For our house the problem is/was that its old (about a 105 years) and while we've done renovations to it, it still doesn't have the R value of modern house, by a lot. The house was converted from radiators to baseboard back in the 80's but the outside walls have only had blown in insulation. A gut reno is needed to insulate it the way a newer house would be built today.  The boiler does fine until we get much below zero, then the space heaters have to save the day.  They did last night.

[DavisStraight]

17 minutes ago, wxeyeNH said:

Last night at -20F we ran the oil heat and the wood stove.  Even with that our pipe in the kitchen that leads to the ice maker and to the outdoor faucet froze.  It still is frozen.  With the crazy wind and sub zero temperatures the cold air was coming in everywhere.  I guess that is expected in a 230 year old restored New England cape.  

My house was an old house too. 

[weathafella]

No issues here.  House is circa 1947 so it’s not terribly old.  And prior owners kept it in great shape although we did add to the insulation.  We had a roaring fire from the fireplace for hours but it might as well have been in the 30s-everything worked fine.

[kdxken]

12° still The high for the day. Not too bad by the fire pit if you have some black locust.

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/RPW2lSVs6j0?feature=share

[Modfan2]

When’s the warm up start? Stuck at 13

[HIPPYVALLEY]

Down to 10° here off high of 12°

[CoastalWx]

Sounds like some big problems in a few major Boston hospitals with burst pipes.

[weathafella]

19 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Sounds like some big problems in a few major Boston hospitals with burst pipes.

In 2016, the place I worked had something like 60 pipes burst.   It was an utter disaster for months.

[kdxken]

1 hour ago, DavisStraight said:

Houses with crawl spaces are notorious for pipes freezing in this cold weather, actually had it happen to a rental house I owned, ended up insulating more and wrapped the pipes with a heating cord.

Yup, grew up in a 300-year-old house. pipes always froze in the crawl spaces no matter what you did.

[kdxken]

57 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Sounds like some big problems in a few major Boston hospitals with burst pipes.

Girlfriend lives in an apartment building. Just had a fire alarm. Frozen pipes no doubt.

[kdxken]

1 hour ago, Modfan2 said:

When’s the warm up start? Stuck at 13

Just hit 13° . And so it begins.

[RCNYILWX]

Yeah I check MPV with some frequency and haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.  BTV, MVL, MPV are the ones I generally look at frequency and haven’t seen anything too weird. 
That one yesterday is a no brainer though.

I work at NWS Chicago (originally from Queens in NYC). Don't want to speak for anyone from NWS BTV and [mention=44]OceanStWx[/mention] can comment but wanted to mention our usual protocol. Also for us, we are much more rigid in making sure the data is as good as possible for our 2 primary climate sites (Chicago-O'Hare and Rockford, IL) vs. the non primary climate ASOS sites in our area.

Re. the MPV error, for that noticeable and sudden a temperature error, we might be contacted first by AOMC, who oversees sensor errors and opens trouble tickets for the electronics techs to perform the maintenance and then clear the tickets. If they don't contact us, we would contact them to open a trouble ticket and then probably set the data to missing if there's no observer to take manual obs as backup. The problem with the sites without observers is that there's no form of backup that can be substituted in for that data, so it unfortunately would probably have to stay as missing data.

For the MPV data, if it's not fixed over the next few days (we do almost always notice and discuss errors like these), there would be nothing wrong with emailing the BTV public email account to let them know. Since it appears the low temp was way off, that data can at least be set to missing and not stand as official for that site for the date, if it's found to be erroneous.

For a persistent seeming warm bias like ORH, that one is tougher. ORH is I assume a long running primary climate site like BOS and is probably routinely checked for calibration by the ETs. There's a rather large error bar (+/- 2F) for passing calibration checks, so if the sensor passes and has no other known issues, it's less likely to be "fixable". We have seen cases in which a sensor routinely passed calibration checks, still seemed too warm or cold, but then the issue went away when the temperature sensor was fully replaced. Full replacement is I believe done on an amount of time since installation or on a routine replacement schedule vs the sensor being persistently slightly warm or cold.

[HIPPYVALLEY]

1 hour ago, kdxken said:

Just hit 13° . And so it begins.

Yes I'm moving up now. 14/-1

[mreaves]

3 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Yeah and that’s how I picked out ORH pretty quickly yesterday. I had been suspicious of them for a while (due to their monthly departures always being warmer than other sites recently) but didn’t bother to deep-dive until this cold snap…this was a perfect atmosphere to do a QC and they quickly did not pass the smell test. Solid 2-3F too warm. 
 

It looks like MPV’s malfunction was only yesterday though right? It seemed like from Brian’s graph that the ASOS there was fine for the first part of the day and then rapidly went haywire. 

That would be my guess. I’m a few miles from there an about 150’ higher but there generally isn’t a big difference. It stood out yesterday for the first time I can really remember. 

[NorEastermass128]

My old thermometer recorded -12F at my parents in Rockport last night. Pretty impressive. 
 

Now back to 40s/50s and rain until about Memorial Day. 

[Sey-Mour Snow]

Hilarious that the high of the day will come from a 45 minute temp spike between 11:15 and midnight. Just spiked to 18 degrees here from 14 at 11pm. 

[The 4 Seasons]

Min temps and windchills across CT. Reports are from here, NWS PNS, and ASOS

[WxWatcher007]

2 minutes ago, The 4 Seasons said:

Min temps and windchills across CT. Reports are from here, NWS PNS, and ASOS

Love this. Your maps are great.

[weathafella]

2 hours ago, RCNYILWX said:

I work at NWS Chicago (originally from Queens in NYC). Don't want to speak for anyone from NWS BTV and [mention=44]OceanStWx[/mention] can comment but wanted to mention our usual protocol. Also for us, we are much more rigid in making sure the data is as good as possible for our 2 primary climate sites (Chicago-O'Hare and Rockford, IL) vs. the non primary climate ASOS sites in our area.

Re. the MPV error, for that noticeable and sudden a temperature error, we might be contacted first by AOMC, who oversees sensor errors and opens trouble tickets for the electronics techs to perform the maintenance and then clear the tickets. If they don't contact us, we would contact them to open a trouble ticket and then probably set the data to missing if there's no observer to take manual obs as backup. The problem with the sites without observers is that there's no form of backup that can be substituted in for that data, so it unfortunately would probably have to stay as missing data.

For the MPV data, if it's not fixed over the next few days (we do almost always notice and discuss errors like these), there would be nothing wrong with emailing the BTV public email account to let them know. Since it appears the low temp was way off, that data can at least be set to missing and not stand as official for that site for the date.

For a persistent seeming warm bias like ORH, that one is tougher. ORH is I assume a long running primary climate site like BOS and is probably routinely checked for calibration by the ETs. There's a rather large error bar (+/- 2F) for passing calibration checks, so if the sensor passes and has no other known issues, it's less likely to be "fixable". We have seen cases in which a sensor routinely passed calibration checks, still seemed too warm or cold, but then the issue went away when the temperature sensor was fully replaced. Full replacement is I believe done on an amount of time since installation or on a routine replacement schedule vs the sensor being persistently slightly warm or cold.

Welcome to our mayhem!  I remember hanging out in your local thread when we were in Chicago for a long spell during January 2021-a good chicago snow month.

BOS was over 1F high for a long time until they fixed it.  I think Scott (coastalWx) and Will (ORH_WxMan) can speak with more authority on it.   It was infuriating given the climate significance of bad data for the biggest population center of New England and it didn’t seem to be prioritized as high as it should have been.

 

[RCNYILWX]

Welcome to our mayhem!  I remember hanging out in your local thread when we were in Chicago for a long spell during January 2021-a good chicago snow month.
BOS was over 1F high for a long time until they fixed it.  I think Scott (coastalWx) and Will (ORH_WxMan) can speak with more authority on it.   It was infuriating given the climate significance of bad data for the biggest population center of New England and it didn’t seem to be prioritized as high as it should have been.
 

Haha thanks! It's been cold but otherwise very quiet out here this week, so I have been lurking on this thread. January 2021 definitely ended up being a good snow month in Chicago after a quiet start that ended up kicking off an even bigger month for the city. And I know you were on the thread for the pre-Christmas storm.

Re. Boston data, I completely understand frustration if it's not addressed. Only speaking for our two primary climate sites, unfortunately there's less we can do than we'd like at times. We can guess a persistent bias is sensor related, change in built environment (ie. new runways at airports, interstates built nearby and relatively near the sensor, etc) related, or a combination of factors.

As one example, I firmly believe Chicago-O'Hare having the city's (entire PoR) warmest summer on record in 2020 was mostly if not entirely related to new highways being built near the west side of the airport. We couldn't do anything to fix that. That construction wound down and the warm bias seemed to ease, though overall more urbanization around ORD has contributed to it being warmer than it was back in the 80s and 90s (on top of background warming).

For another example, Midway Airport was running persistently a degree or two warm for a good chunk of 2022, especially with highs. MDW isn't the official climate site but being an important city ob site with a long period of record and relatively close to the office, the ETs get out there often. They checked the sensor and it cleared calibration multiple times. But they ended up finally replacing the temp sensor (think it was part of a larger issue and not bc we/the forecasters asked) and sure enough, the warm bias went away immediately.

I'm not saying BOS couldn't have been fixed sooner and it's likely that the issue was well known with the ops staff. However, sometimes it's not as simple or easy as doing what our hardcore weather enthusiast selves (as many of my coworkers are) would fix immediately, and it probably wasn't ignored. Those who can better speak to the issue can correct me if there's already information on this, but if I were to guess, the issue, if it was sensor related, was known and checked multiple times and the ETs kept checking calibration and it passed. I'm not sure if our Observational Program Leader and even the MIC have the authority to order the ESA (in charge of the el techs) to order the ETs to replace a temperature sensor if it passes their calibration checks, even if we tell them we think the sensor is still off. It's possible that something similar to our recent situation with the MDW temperature sensor played out at Boston.

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[UnitedWx]

Ours house is a 1920 bungalow. In the 80s lots of it was gutted an renovated (unfortunately). Modern for the time insulation was added but there's still glaring issues we want address. Living room was blown out into an inset front porch with no basement underneath. Times like last night you can just feel the cold radiating in from outside. Our goal this year is to open up underneath remove all the old fiberglass bat insulation and spray enclosed cell foam. A custom of mine just did the same thing and the different is amazing.  I wish I could afford to do the whole house!!

[SouthCoastMA]

Temp up to 29. 

39° swing since 24 hours ago. Also, woke up to a random dusting of snow

[Modfan2]

4 minutes ago, SouthCoastMA said:

Temp up to 29. 

39° swing since 24 hours ago. Also, woke up to a random dusting of snow

Sitting at 16, was expecting a larger jump in temps over night

[Ginx snewx]

4 minutes ago, Modfan2 said:

Sitting at 16, was expecting a larger jump in temps over night

Warmer at elevation.  26 at my house 19 at work in Danielson.

[Baroclinic Zone]

32F temp change from 24hrs ago.

[HoarfrostHubb]

6 minutes ago, Baroclinic Zone said:

32F temp change from 24hrs ago.

37 here.   Went from -16 to 21F