Mt. Washington Breaks Snow Record

Even Mount Washington, New Hampshire, home of "the world's worst weather", breaks a record now and then. From their observer's blog this morning:

They have several photos online, including massive snow drifts, snow drifting in the doorway, and their staff celebrating the broken record.

You'd think for a location that normally gets 256" of snow a year, they wouldn't be surprised to see so much in a day. But Mount Washington is so high that it is sometimes located above the clouds. This happened on Tuesday and, while lower elevations were racking up the snow, they had no precipitation. A radar image below (courtesy AccuWeather.com's street-level RadarPlus system) shows their location with an "X" -- notice the heavy snow to the west, lighter snow around the mountain, and no precip at all on the mountain. (As noted below, this might actually be the radar's beam being blocked by the mountain... the point is, they had very light or no precipitation).

More from their blog:

The weather history of Mount Washington is fascinating. They hold the world's wind record,* among others. Their weather is so extreme, their observations are usually withheld from weather maps and reports. They have several webcams, but the view is often obstructed by clouds, snow or ice this time of year. If you can't see the view at the top, check this webcam which looks at the mountain from below.

* Mount Washington maintains the official surface-wind record measured by an instrument. Preliminary reports during Typhoon Paka indicated that this record was broken on December 16, 1997 when instrumentation (which was later found to be unreliable) measured a 236 mph gust. A remote Doppler radar also measured a wind of 318 mph in the Oklahoma City tornado in 1999, but the observation was "hundreds of feet" high, rather than on the ground as the Mount Washington record. Prior to that, a "near-surface" wind reading of 286 mph was recorded by Doppler radar in a tornado in 1991, but that record is not considered official because it was not measured by an instrument and may have not been on ground level.

NOTE: More information on the World Wind Speed record is now available.