Happy Thanksgiving!
Bitterly Cold Black Friday Will Be Among the Coldest on Record in Parts of the Northeast.
An arctic air mass will engulf the Northeast in time for Thanksgiving weekend.
Lows will be 10 to 20 degrees below average Black Friday.
Another blast of cold air will bring one of the coldest Thanksgivings on record for some Northeast cities.
According to The Weather Channel, a strong area of high pressure originating from the Arctic Circle is now sweeping into the Northeast and will send temperatures plummeting toward levels you might expect on New Year's Day, not Thanksgiving Day.
Low temperatures Thanksgiving morning and Black Friday will be 15 to 30 degrees below average for late November.
The temperature for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City was the coldest iteration of the event since it began in 1924.
The parade started with temperatures near 20 degrees -7 deg C, northwest winds from 15 to 20 mph and feels like temperatures of 7-10 degrees -23 deg C.
New York's Central Park dropped to 19 degrees early Thanksgiving morning, making it the second-coldest Thanksgiving low at New York City's Central Park and coldest start turkey day since 1901. Morning wind chills in the city were in the upper single digits.
Other record temperatures on Thanksgiving, so far, include Portland, Maine (6 degrees) -23 deg C, Worcester, Massachusetts (7 degrees), Hartford, Connecticut (11 degrees) and Providence, Rhode Island (15 degrees).
Meanwhile Feds are to release major climate report today after Thanksgiving.
According to USA Today, The federal government will release a major climate change report – Volume II of the National Climate Assessment – on Black Friday, typically one of the slowest news days of the year.
“It’s an absolute disgrace to bury the truth about climate impacts in a year that saw hundreds of Americans die during devastating climate-fueled mega-fires, hurricanes, floods, and algal blooms," said National Wildlife Federation president Collin O’Mara in a statement.
Volume II is expected to detail a range of current and future climate change impacts and again warn that the Earth is warming, humans are the cause, and the already serious impacts – such as the current California wildfires – are only going to get worse, Climate Central said.
The report is also slated to contain a new chapter focusing exclusively on the U.S. Caribbean territories such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
President Donald Trump, a repeated skeptic of climate change, took to Twitter on Wednesday night to again express his doubts, using the especially cold Thanksgiving forecast as an example.
"Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?" the president tweeted.
Volume I of the report was released a year ago.
It outlined the current understanding of the science behind climate change and was described as the largest, most comprehensive U.S.-focused report ever produced about our warming world.
As first mandated by Congress in the late 1980s, the assessment is prepared every four years by the nation's top scientists from 13 agencies.
It's meant as a reference for the president, Congress and the public.
The World Resources Institute said it "will be an invaluable tool for leaders who want to protect their citizens."
Why release it on what's practically a national holiday?
Perhaps it because "we know climate change is not a priority for this administration," Placky said.
In 2017, President Donald Trump said he planned to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement, which requires countries to establish ambitious targets to reduce the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming.
He once also tweeted that global warming was a "hoax."
O'Mara of the wildlife federation said that "releasing the National Climate Assessment on Black Friday won’t obscure the fact that authorities are still identifying bodies in California’s unprecedented mega-fires, Florida is still dealing with toxic algae outbreaks fueled by warmer water, and Americans are still picking up the pieces from Hurricanes Florence and Michael and Typhoon Yutu that were worsened by climate change."
Meteorologist Angela Fritz with the Capital Weather Gang asked: "Is there any way it could be buried more?
How about New Year's Eve at 9 pm, guys?"
NOAA research meteorologist Harold Brooks also chimed in, tweeting, "Other than Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve, could there be a worse day of the year to release it?"
The Thanksgiving-holiday release comes more than two weeks earlier than the original planned release at the American Geophysical Union annual conference in December, according to Climate Nexus.
Another possible reason for releasing a report about global warming this Friday could be because the weather will be near-record cold in the heavily populated and media-saturated northeastern U.S.
Climate Change
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