Get ready for an even bigger chill. Siberian air to make Trump swearing-in coldest in 40 years
Share:
The vast majority of Americans are about to get an extended taste of frigid Siberian weather. Another polar vortex disruption will stretch Arctic air across the top of the globe and make Donald Trump's second inauguration the coldest in 40 years, meteorologists said.
After starting in the Rockies Thursday night, the cold will blast eastward and as far south as the upper Florida peninsula over several days. Up to 280 million Americans will have a day or two where it’s colder than Anchorage, Alaska, said private meteorologist Ryan Maue.
“This would be one of the coldest outbreaks certainly of the past 10 years, 15 years,” said winter weather expert Judah Cohen of Atmospheric Environmental Research. “It’s pulling air out of Siberia. And, you know, that’s consistent with these stretches because when the polar vortex stretches, the flow starts in Siberia and ends in the United States.”.
It will arrive in Washington well before Trump's inauguration Monday outside the U.S. Capitol. The National Weather Service is predicting the temperature to be around 22 degrees (minus-6 Celsius) at noon during the swearing-in, the coldest since Ronald Reagan's second inauguration saw temperatures plunge to 7 degrees (minus-14 Celsius). Barack Obama 2009 swearing-in was 28 degrees (minus-2 Celsius).
But that's not all because the wind is forecast to be 30 to 35 mph (48 to 56 kph). “The wind chills would be in the single digits for sure,” the NWS' Weather Prediction Center meteorologist Zack Taylor said. “That’s going to be cold, blustery, basically right up the National Mall. And it can get pretty breezy on the mall there with the west-northwest wind right in the face.”.
