From June 18 to 20, five NESCAC colleges — six if we round up — experienced a true heat wave with three consecutive days of 90-degree-plus temperatures.

In the spirit of that definition, we’ll use the sum total of degrees during the three days for this edition of our occasional ranking of NESCAC colleges on very cold or very hot days.

Lyrically and meteorologically, the late Glenn Frey hinted as what causes a heat wave with his 1984 hit, “The Heat Is On.”

“The heat is on,” he sang, adding, “the pressure’s high.” Exactly, Glenn! A high pressure system can lead to the kind of very hot weather all of us is ‘Cactown felt this week.

High pressure is partly defined by sinking air. And all across the ‘Cac, the sinking air underneath our resident high pressure dome got hotter as it became compressed by the high atmospheric pressure close to the Earth’s surface. It’s called “adiabatic warming,” the same phenomenon that creates warm to hot Santa Ana and Chinooks winds in the West.

Coolest to warmest, here’s our NESCAC Heat Poll for June 18–20. The coolest customers were close to the prevailing south wind coming off the Atlantic Ocean; the hottest is within an .

For each college, the three-day total of degrees is followed by the high temperature on June 18, 19, and 20.

11.

How their mascot beats the heat: Camels use thick fur as insulation.

10.

How their mascot beats the heat: Cardinals seek shade, pant, bath, and hold their wings away from their bodies to increase airflow.

9.

How their mascot beats the heat: Panthers seek shade during heat of the day.

8.

How their mascot beats the heat: Polar bears swim in cold water and seek shade.

7.

How their mascot beats the heat: Mules seek shade, sweat, may roll in mud or water.

6.

How their mascot beats the heat: Bantams seek shade, pant, spread wings to increase airflow.

5.

How their mascot beats the heat: Alexander Hamilton fought the British in the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1779, in temperatures near 100 degrees, and it’s said that Continentals were allowed to remove their uniforms.

4. (at the college)

How their mascot beats the heat: Cows seek shade, reduce their activity, sweat.

3. (at the college)

How their mascot beats the heat: Uncertain what mammoths did, probably rarely encountering blistering heat.

2.

How our mascot beats the heat: Bobcats rest in shaded, cool areas during the heat of the day.

1. (at the university)

How their mascot beats the heat: Elephants flap ears and take mud and water baths; plus, their permeable skin helps them stay cool.

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

After last weekend’s cold snap, Sakina Saidi ’26 and her fellow Bobcats have some bragging rights with friends back home. “Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I survived minus 30 Celsius!’ That’s a big achievement!”

Whether expressed in Celsius, the temperature scale used in Saidi’s homeland of Afghanistan, or in Fahrenheit, the scale used around here, it was beaucoup degrees below zero last Friday night into Saturday morning, Feb. 3–4, on the �ֲ���ý campus.

�ֲ���ý didn’t quite get down to Saidi’s estimate of 30 below Celsius, which equals 22 degrees below Fahrenheit, but pretty close: It was 15.3 degrees below zero, according to a nearby Weather Underground reporting station.

For �ֲ���ý, that was good for fourth place in the year’s first NESCAC Chill Poll, our occasional ranking of the coldest campuses in the ’Cac. (Full results below).

The northwest wind, which was swift and steady at 25 mph all night, pushed the wind chill to 40-plus degrees below zero. So if you know your �ֲ���ý campus geography, that means you would get a face full of eyelash-freezing (true!) wind leaving Commons or Alumni Gym.

After a mostly balmy winter, the cold definitely was a wakeup call. “I think people are like, ‘Oh wow, Maine winter is no joke,” said Sydney Schuster ’25 of Simsbury, Conn.

She and other students heeded the call to dress in layers. “After walking to Commons, it was 10 minutes to get them all off,” she said.

Schuster likes how Mainers “embrace the cold. In Connecticut, they just get afraid of it. There’s a culture here around cold weather. I think that’s fun — it brought the people together, in a weird way.”

Kellen Seth ’25 of Ambler, Pa., also embraced the “As Maine Goes” vibe. “I came to college in Maine. It’s what I expect,” he said.

What was also fun for these �ֲ���ý students was how it felt on Sunday when the temperature went above freezing and then on Monday, when it shot to above 40 degrees.

“It made me appreciate when it’s even 20 out,” said Elsa Daulerio ‘26 of Harpswell, Maine. “We were in shorts yesterday,” added Sophie Spolter ‘26 of Blacklick, Ohio.

As the cold departed on Sunday, Saidi called her mother and told her that the day was very warm. “What is the temperature?” her mother asked. “I said, ‘1 degree Celsius.’ And she said, ‘That is not warm!’

“But it felt warm to me!”

6.

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

For a word that’s bandied about so gleefully by weather buffs, “blizzard” sure carries a lot of uncertainty.

Did you know this: It doesn’t even need to snow for a blizzard to occur?

The snow can be falling or merely blowing. Either way, visibility must be reduced below a quarter mile, and the wind must “frequently” gust to 35mph or more. Those conditions must be the “predominant” observation for at least three straight hours.

Students having fun sledding: 1950Students having fun on the Quad: Jan. 29, 2022

Use your mouse to grab the slider (or swipe your finger if on a phone or tablet) to reveal more or less of each image.

The Jan. 29 storm met those criteria throughout eastern New England. (The National Weather Service office in Norton, Mass., issued a nifty and .) Media reports suggest that blizzard conditions were met here in Maine, too.

And did you know this: While the word “blizzard” has been around since the 1800s, . Its first meaning, early in the 1800s, was something — not necessarily snow — delivered fiercely, like a punch, gunshot, or argument.

The book Slang and Its Analogues in 1890 gave this example of that early usage: “If a magistrate lectured a litigant severely he gave him a blizzard.” The word took on its current meaning, of a major snowstorm, later in the 1800s.

And before all these words pile up like, well, snow in storm, let’s get to our list of the campuses in the ‘CAC that saw the most snow from the Jan. 29 storm. As predicted, the coastal storm dropped the most snow on the conference’s eastern campuses; those on the western periphery got shut out.

Snowfall amounts are taken from National Weather Service reports, which include trained spotters, NWS employees, and volunteers.

9 (tie). Hamilton: 0

9 (tie). Middlebury: 0

9 (tie). Williams: 0

8. Amherst: 4 inches

7. Trinity: 6 inches

6. Wesleyan: 8 inches

5. �ֲ���ý: 16* inches

* National Weather Service reports around Lewiston varied considerably. This measurement is from a trained spotter.

4. Colby: 17* inches

* The nearest NWS snowfall report to Waterville was about 10 miles to the northeast, in Clinton.

3. Bowdoin: 18 inches

2. Connecticut College: 20 inches

1. Tufts: 24 inches

Snowfall amounts are taken from National Weather Service reports nearest each campus.

A couple of true or false questions for you.

1. “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” False: It can be the “darkest” most any time of the night depending on the moon, light pollution, etc.
2. “It’s always coldest before dawn.” Often true…especially when we’re talking about the NESCAC Chill Poll for Jan. 22, a night of ideal radiational cooling.

For the record, Middlebury, in Vermont, hit 19 degrees below zero on Jan. 22, making it the coldest campus in the ‘Cac.

Radiational cooling is when warmish air escapes into the atmosphere on calm and clear nights. At the same time, cold, denser air settles into low spots.

For ideal cooling, these low spots should be like geographic bowls. There are some notorious ones, like the one in the Canaan Valley of West Virginia, where the on the 22nd. Some weather folks call these isolated pockets “fake cold,” in that radiational cold spots can rebound quite quickly the next morning than when cold air is present top to bottom and throughout the lower atmosphere.

Sometimes, nights with strong radiational cooling create temperature inversions, where it’s colder in these sheltered inland cold spots than it is thousands of feet high up in the mountains. Typically, you’d expect the reverse.

Here’s a vivid example from last week. The summit of Mount Washington, famed for its intense winter weather, only got down to minus 1 degree on the 22nd — warmer than coastal Brunswick! No wonder Polar Bears prefer Bowdoin.

One marker of a radiational cooling night is that the until the sun is strong enough can do its thing. That happened in Middlebury, where the temperature continued to drop for a half hour after 7:19 a.m. sunrise.

Here’s the lineup for Jan. 22, 2022:

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

�ֲ���ý eked out a victory in this week’s NESCAC Chill Poll, our occasional survey of the coldest campuses in the ‘Cac on chilly winter nights. But oh, what might have been!

A week ago, it looked like we were heading toward a robust NESCAC Chill Poll. Forecasters said that cold air would roll in on Monday and Tuesday, then a calm Tuesday night would allow any remaining warm air to escape into the night sky, letting the temps tumble.

We envisioned skinny Mules snuggling up with burly Polar Bears, shivering Jumbos seeking warmth from husky and hirsute Mammoths. (Bobcats, at least the feline kind, aren’t into snuggling.)

But early this week, the forecast had changed. Rather than a clear and calm night, perfect for radiational cooling, the forecast called for increasing clouds — nature’s blanket — and a region-wide puff of warm air entering NESCAC Nation by mid-evening.

And boy did it ever, creating what weather folks call a “non-diurnal” pattern. Instead of falling overnight, the temperatures rose.

• Here in Lewiston, it went from 7 below at midnight to 5 above by 7:14 a.m. sunrise on Wednesday.
• In urban Medford, Mass., a metropolitan area home of the Tufts Jumbos and near the warmish ocean, it was the same story. Eight degrees by 8 o’clock Tuesday evening, but 15 degrees by sunrise Wednesday.
• In New London, Conn., home of Connecticut College, the rise was dramatic. A dead-calm overnight allowed the temperature to fall to 7 degrees by 5:30 a.m. Then the warmish west breeze kicked in, and the temperature rose 19 degrees in just an hour!
• In Clinton, N.Y., home of the Hamilton Continentals, the warm air arrived first, so their low temperature was actually recorded early Tuesday morning. They never got below zero Tuesday night.

Here’s the full listing:

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

Back off, Snow Miser! Turns out that Heat Miser still has something to say about our warm weather in 2020.

And what he says is that Tufts University had the warmest high temperature of any NESCAC school during the recent warm wave, hitting 80.8 degrees on Nov. 7 to win this edition of the occasional NESCAC weather poll.

Truth be told, we were tempted to toss out the Tufts ballot. It was a few degrees higher than the high temperature recorded that day at nearby Logan Airport, 74 degrees. But this is NESCAC, and we trust each other to play fair and trust the outcome. So, congrats, Jumbos! (And we NESCACers also believe in science: Logan is close to the water, hence often cooler in summer, and warmer in winter.)

But what a wacky week-plus for the Boston area. An all-time October record 4.3 inches of snow fell on Oct. 30, then into the 70s just eight days later.

The historic November warm spell was also distinctive in how uniform temperatures were around NESCAC and elsewhere.

“The lack of variability in those temperatures is likely due to the near uniformity of the air mass overall,” explains Greg Postel ’90, an on-camera meteorologist and hurricane and severe weather specialist with the Weather Channel.

“One giant blob of 70s.”

“High temps in New England were about the same as they were in many other places across the country,” he continues. “From Boston, to Atlanta, to Oklahoma City, to Chicago: mid-70s were everywhere during that period. The air mass was basically one giant blob of 70s.”

Here’s the full ranking:

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

And the last shall be first.

Typically an also-ran in our occasional wintertime review of the coldest schools in the NESCAC, Tufts University flipped the script to win our first-ever summertime ranking of the hottest colleges in the ‘Cac, as measured during the July 20-21 warm spell.

The Jumbos vaulted into first place by hitting 101.7 degrees at 2:09 p.m. on July 20, edging second-place Wesleyan, which topped out at 98.9 degrees the next day.

Finishing third was Amherst, with 98.3 degrees on July 20. �ֲ���ý finished seventh with 93 degrees on the 20th.

Last weekend was hot enough to send Bobcats looking for the nearest lake. (Photograph by Portlande)

In our six prior wintertime NESCAC Chill Polls, Tufts stayed warm and cozy, never faring better (or colder) than 8th. That’s due to its relative proximity to the ocean plus the urban heat island effect, which

In summer, that heat island effect might’ve given Tufts, located in the Greater Boston area, the winning edge.

By contrast, the colleges at the bottom of last weekend’s Heat Poll ranking — ones that typical vie for wintertime Chill Poll supremacy — are mostly rural colleges.

Here’s the full list:

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

We try to reserve the NESCAC Chill Poll, an occasional rundown of the coldest campuses in the conference, for big-time, below-zero cold, which �ֲ���ý hasn’t seen the last couple of days.

But we don’t want to give the cold shoulder to our frozen Midwest neighbors, who are in the grips of historic cold, thanks to the infamous polar vortex. Carleton College in Minnesota, for example, hit 34 degrees below zero on Jan. 31.

So, simpatico with our neighbors to the west, we ran a NESCAC Chill Poll on Jan. 31, and here are the results: The winner was Hamilton, at 7.2 degrees below zero, followed by Colby (minus 6), �ֲ���ý (minus 5.3) and Williams (minus 5).

The infamous Midwest cold is due to the well-reported weakening of the polar vortex, allowing cold air to surge south in various places around the world.

Just where the cold air busts loose “is a matter of chance,” says Raj Saha ’03, a lecturer in environmental geophysics at �ֲ���ý who is teaching “Climate Change and Modeling” and the “Polar Environment” this semester.

Raj Saha ’03 shows his students this animation, which shows the Arctic air (pink/purple shading) and winds (white lines) barreling into the Midwest on Jan. 31.

The dividing line between Arctic air to the north and warmer air to the south is the jet stream; as it meanders southward, brutal cold air follows, in this case to the mid-latitudes.

It may seem ironic, he says, but “the cold spell is most likely a byproduct of global warming,” Saha says. “Some recent studies show that this extra meandering is being driven by sea-ice loss in the Arctic.”

This time, the coldest cold missed New England, unlike in February 2015. “New England gets the moderating influence of the ocean Gulf Stream to the east, so it usually does not get hit as hard by the polar vortex,” Saha said.

Raj Saha ’03 (left), a lecturer in environmental geophysics at �ֲ���ý, works with Ian Wax ’19 (center) and Salim Ourari ’18 on a pair of climate-related projects in summer 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The temperature spread between chilly Hamilton and warm Tufts (3.2 degrees) was just 10.4 degrees on the 31st. Often, there’s a bigger spread between the coast and the hinterlands on cold nights.

The constant breeze played a part in the uniformity, preventing both warm air from escaping into the atmosphere and cold air from pooling in traditional cold spots near the ground.

“The persistence of the wind was a big reason why we didn’t ‘maximize’ the coldness of the air mass,” explains Greg Postel ’90, hurricane and storm specialist at The Weather Channel.

Greg Postel ’90 is a hurricane and storm specialist at The Weather Channel.

Saha says that he and his students talk about the polar vortex in “almost every class.”

As for the media’s presentation of polar vortex stories, “I see two things that stand out: as a singular entity, and lots of scientifically informed comments on the other side.”

With each polar vortex episode, “the latter voice has become louder and the skeptic voice has become fainter. I am hoping this is a good sign.”

Here’s who was coldest on the morning of Jan. 31:

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

Last weekend’s cold has conveniently vamoosed (or skedaddled or whatever cold air does) just in time for our students’ return from break.

Diana Flores ‘20 of Bronx, N.Y., who turned 20 years old Thursday, was talking with friends outside Hedge Hall. She pronounced her birthday weather, 43 degrees, as “really great!” Her friends, Luis David Molina Rueda ’20 of Cabra, Spain, and Lillian Chang ’20 of Wilton, Conn., agreed.

“Forty-three is really great!” says Diana Flores ‘20 of the Bronx, N.Y., talking about Thursday’s mild weather as she brandishes the official NESCAC Chill Poll thermometer. She’s posing with friends Luis David Molina Rueda ’20 (left) of Cabra, Spain, and Lillian Chang ’20 of Wilton, Conn. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

How can 43 be mild? Because “we expect the cold weather. It’s Maine,” Flores says. “You just have to prepare for it mentally — along with a big scarf and a coat!”

The departed chill did leave its mark — that being Middlebury’s runaway, 10-degree victory in the first NESCAC Chill Poll of the season, our occasional rundown of the chilliest overnight temperatures in the 11-college conference.

Here are the low temperatures in each NESCAC town on our most recent cold morning, Sunday, Jan. 7:

Taking a turn with the official NESCAC Chill Poll thermometer are sophomores Chris Bierwirth of Hingham, Mass., Zach Farhm of Marlborough, Mass., and Will Nelligan of South Portland, Maine. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations at or close to each campus. On-campus reporting stations are noted.

The colored lines indicate the trajectories of the air now over the NESCAC from near the North Pole. (Model data from NOAA Air Resources Laboratory)

Here at �ֲ���ý, the last day of finals has coincided with a brief cold spell.

That’s ample reason to take a NESCAC Chill Poll, our occasional ranking of the coldest nights in the ‘CAC, which this time around crowns our friends to the north, Colby, as the winner for Dec. 16, 2016.

It’s not just Santa that comes from the Arctic north. This Google Earth image shows where today’s air was three days ago: near the North Pole.

All temperatures are taken from Weather Underground reporting stations either at or closest to each campus. On-campus stations are noted.