From zero to 60: Staunton experiences holiday weather whiplash. What's next?

STAUNTON — It’s a late-December afternoon, and Tony Brumfield is wearing a short-sleeve shirt in the parking lot of WalMart on Richmond Road.

He wasn’t alone in dressing down with temperatures in the Staunton area flirting with the 50s, as many shoppers milled around the shopping complexes in sweatshirts, light jackets and even just simple T-shirts. It would be hard to believe that just five days before, temperatures in Staunton plummeted near and below zero, especially when factoring in wind chill.

But with memories of frozen pipes and wearing sweatshirts and wool socks to bed with four blankets fresh in our minds, The News Leader went out to talk to some residents about what the cold snap brought them for the holiday weekend, and find out what exactly happened in Staunton.

First off, what happened?

The cold hit Brumfield and the Augusta Woods Mobile Home Park hard, as sometime Saturday morning an issue arose with the pumphouse for the area. As a result, there was no running water on Christmas Eve.

For Brumfield’s family, there wasn’t much issue for holiday plans as Brumfield’s wife was working over the holiday weekend. But without water, they had to check into a motel for the night to make sure that they could have water.

“We knew it was coming, and we were prepared,” Brumfield said, now donning a grey T-shirt and thermal undershirt with the sleeves rolled up. They had made sure to get water and supplies before the cold came in, and were able to ride out the weather event.

That event, according to the National Weather Service, was a substantial cold air mass, one that isn’t seen often in the Shenandoah Valley.

“Basically, the air mass came essentially straight from the North Pole and made it down all the way into the southeast United States,” said Cody Ledbetter of the NWS. These type of events are called “arctic outbreaks”.

Arctic outbreaks are not uncommon in the United States, though they are rare in this area. He said that these happen over the Great Plains a lot of the time, but occasionally one will make it through to the southern part of the country.

However, the arctic outbreak was still one of the coldest periods the area has seen in a few years. “It’s probably been four or five years since we saw anything close to this,” Ledbetter said.

Brumfield’s mobile home regained water service at around 4 p.m. on Christmas Day, right before he was about to go around the park to check in on his neighbors. Some, according to Brumfield, are elderly, and he didn’t know how they dealt with the lack of water.

Now taking in the warmer weather this week, Brumfield was upbeat, saying that despite the issues, he wasn’t really bothered by the events of his weekend, but he recognized how cold it had gotten. A 15-year resident of the area, this felt like the coldest he could remember the area getting.

“First time there was ice on the storm door,” Brumfield said while laughing, “That never happened before.”

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So why is it warm all of a sudden?

For Jill Haines, the holiday weekend was difficult, but not necessarily from the cold. Haines came down with COVID heading into the weekend and was unable to partake in her usual holiday events. However, Haines is a former resident of Minnesota, and the cold over the weekend didn’t bother her much.

“I used to walk my dogs in negative 24 degree weather,” Haines said with a chuckle, adding, “The cold doesn’t bother me anyway.”

Haines also pointed to how blessed the area had been compared to regions of the country that were ravaged by winter storm Elliot, like in upstate New York. Haines has a friend that works at a hospital in that area, and said that she was snowed in to the hospital for three days.

Arctic outbreaks depend on a lot of factors along their path that dictate the strength that an area will see. Those factors include snowpack and weather conditions further north, like in Canada. However, winter storm Elliot wouldn’t have contributed to that, as it was happening concurrently with the arctic outbreak that made it down to Virginia.

But now, with temperatures trending up to the 60s in the next week, the natural question comes: is this typical?

According to Ledbetter, maybe not typical, but it happens a fair amount. The movement of weather patterns depends on a great number of factors, and sometimes cold air masses will sit in an area for a week or two. In this case, however, appears to have been a weather pattern where things just flipped quickly, and a warm air mass moved in shortly after the arctic outbreak.

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So what’s the rest of the winter going to look like?

Angelica Circelli doesn’t live in the area, but is visiting family for the holiday from Florida. Everything is cold in her eyes.

So when she went to get water from the fridge last Thursday and nothing came out, she informed her father who then began to check the fridge.

“My dad thought the fridge was broken,” Circelli said, laughing while remembering her father grumbling about recently purchasing the appliance and it already being broken.

However, it turns out that the pipe feeding water to the fridge was frozen, but no other water pipes in the house had frozen. Getting hot water took a while, but they still had running water.

Circelli visited last year as well, and was confident it was colder this time around. Circelli’s family is of Latin American descent, and a popular tradition for New Year’s is to take a packed suitcase outside and walk around, whether it be the block or your house, to invite good tidings for plenty of travel in the coming year. During the Christmas weekend however, Circelli’s grandmother had already put the kibosh on the tradition if it remained cold.

Circelli and her family are in luck, however, as according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center — this winter was supposed to have above-average temperatures. Excluding last weeks arctic outbreak, that’s pretty much been the case.

That isn’t to say that other cold weather events couldn’t spring up, much like last week’s arctic outbreak, but according to Ledbetter, “There’s probably a lot more days closer to average or above average.” Average for this time of year, based on the instruments at Washington Dulles International Airport, is around 43-44 degrees with lows in the mid to upper 20s.

“So when we get to 60s, that would be very warm, but that’s not to say we don’t see that too often,” Ledbetter said.

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—Akhil Ganesh is the Government Reporter at The News Leader. You can contact him at aganesh@newsleader.com and follow him on Twitter @akhildoesthings.

This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Staunton experiences holiday weather whiplash as temps soar