WEATHER

Greencastle experiences the four seasons, with snow typical in the winter, and heat a part of every summer. The trees and flowers bud in the spring, and leaves fall in autumn. Nevertheless, extremes occur frequently enough to make life interesting, and cause people to watch the weather forecast to know how to plan their time. Robert Wertime, assisting his late father Rudolf, began recording weather data as a teenager in the late 1960s. By the mid-1980s they were serious with the pastime, and became valuable resources on weather conditions. Today Wertime continues the service, and is a media contact as well as a “ground-truth person” for the National Weather Service. NWS knows that Wertime knows what he is talking about.

A national organization that compiles weather statistics published average monthly temperature ranges for our area, with January the coldest month at 28 degrees and July the hottest at 74 degrees. On the moisture side, January and February average 2.7 inches of precipitation and May is the wettest at 3.9 inches.

Wertime watches temperatures, rainfall, cloud cover and visibility, organizing the information into daily, monthly and yearly charts. He is also a walking encyclopedia on weather highlights for the decades.

The Greencastle area was hit in February 1962 with a dramatic thunderstorm, with the lightning display in shades of blue and orange. Sleet and hail also fell. The early 1960s were known for cold and snow.

“Electrically violent” thunderstorms occurred in the late 1960s into the 70s, and again in the 1990s. These made the summers exciting. Winters were particularly cold for about a decade starting in the late 1960s. They felt long and they were long! They were followed by mild winters in the 1980s, so people began to think about global warming.

But a few blizzards came along to jar the senses. In January of 1994 the temperature got to more than 30 degrees below zero, and snow lay 16 to 20 inches deep. Exactly two years later, January 1996, came 28 inches of snow, resulting in drifts of five to 15 feet.

Curiously, the wind left bare spots on the ground in some places. In January 2016 winter storm Jonas left 22 inches of snow in its wake. Other anomalies also kept people talking. Hurricane Agnes struck in 1972, but wind damage was not truly that great. It was a significant event in Greencastle, though, because Martin’s Mill Bridge was all but destroyed. The storm resulted in six to eight inches of rain within four days. That was not the heaviest to strike the area though. In August 1968 we received 3.2 inches in 20 minutes. If it had kept up for an hour, there would have been 10 inches of water flooding the area. And the heaviest rain ever is in very recent memory, in September 2011, with 11 inches over a few days. Many people who had never had wet basements before did then. The area was spared significant damage during Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 29, 2012. Then the winter of 2013-14 never seemed to end.

The snow and cold caused school to be closed 11 days. At the other end of the spectrum, record dry weather took place in the summers of 1965 and ‘66, in 1998, and again in 2002 and ‘03. These rivaled the days of the Depression.

The 1990s were the wettest and most humid on record, Wertime discovered. And the first true tornados rolled through in April 1994. It is obvious Greencastle can be a lively place to live year ‘round.

Commercial/Residential Properties and Equipment Financing

CENTURY LEASING COMPANY

27 EAST BALTIMORE STREET P.O. BOX 277 GREENCASTLE, PA 17225 (717) 597-9500 (717) 597-2121 FAX (717) 597-2122 LEASEJSK@COMCAST.NET

http://centuryincproperties.com

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