MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The forecast doesn’t call for much relief during the first week of January as bitter cold continues to tighten it’s grip on North Central West Virginia thanks to the addition of light winds.
“Wednesday, Thursday, they get some relief, but then by next Sunday [Jan. 8, 2018] we start to see a little bit of the pattern changing,” National Weather Service Meteorologist John Darnley said.
A very cold first weekend in January, which is expected to include significant wind chills, will then give way to some slight relief.
“We start to see a little bit more warmer air from the south move in as opposed to the northwest flow that we’ve had,” Darnley said.
In the meantime, the bitterly cold temperatures that may occasionally dip below zero will require extra precaution from residents.
“You can be outside with breaks throughout the day, but you have to be dressed properly and you have to know the warning signs of hypothermia,” Darnley said.
Those warning signs can include shivering, confusion, and muscle tightness. In later, more dangerous stages comes paradoxical undressing and burrowing.
“When you have winds of five miles per hour and you have a temperature of minus five, that’s going to give you a windchill temperature of minus 16,” Darnley said.
Darnley said the conditions will be ripe for frost bite and hypothermia if people exposed to the conditions don’t take the conditions seriously.
“You have to have a minimum of three layers on,” he said. “You have to have a hat, a face mask, outer layers, boots, and two layers of pants.”
With temperatures anywhere between 20 and 30 degrees below the average for this time of year, Darnley said even minor wind can become exponentially more dangerous.
“When it’s this cold, it doesn’t take a lot of wind to actually change the atmospheric temperature to feel like frost bite type temperature,” he said.
Nightly lows are expected to remain in the single digits for most of the next few nights into and beyond New Year’s Day.