Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 23, 1994                   TAG: 9401230084
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

HOW COLD WAS IT? WHO KNOWS?

The worst part is, we'll never really know.

Instead, it will just go down as one of those eerie mysteries of science.

Did a comet really kill the dinosaurs?

Did the Celts really use Stonehenge as a giant celestial calendar?

And did Jill Lightner of the Highland County community of Headwaters really measure a temperature of 40 below zero in last Wednesday's cold gray dawn?

There's no question that's the reading she saw when she got up at 6 a.m. to toss another log on the fire and couldn't resist taking another peek at the thermometer hanging on the shed in the back yard.

"I had gotten up to fix the fire at 4:30, and it was minus 36 then," she says. When the fading fire beckoned again, "it had dropped another four degrees."

There's no question, either, that Lightner's neighbors in Virginia's highest county saw their mercury plunge nearly as much when the Cold Wave of '94 sank into their hollows overnight.

Highland County Sheriff Herb Lightner - Jill's brother-in-law - found himself doubling as the county's unofficial meteorologist Wednesday morning, as flabbergasted citizens flooded his office with calls about the temperature.

"They were saying they couldn't believe their thermometers, and they were curious to see what we had," the sheriff says. "We had everything from 30 below to 39 below. I've got two deputies standing here, and the one had 37 below, and the other had 36 below."

The cold weather was the talk of the county, the sheriff says, as farmers gave up trying to crank their tractors - "You can't feed the cattle those round bales if the tractor doesn't start" - and congregated at Ernie's Market to compare notes.

"Everyone feels they set the record," the sheriff says.

But we'll never know - because Highland County no longer has an official weather station.

So what? you ask. There are plenty of places that don't have official stations.

True, but finding out Highland County no longer is on the state's official weather map is like finding out the Dallas Cowboys are no longer in the National Football League. If Roanoke disappeared from the map, well, that would be like the Seattle Seahawks going belly up. Who would notice? But Highland County? Hey, we're not talking just any old place here; we're talking about the cold weather champs.

On any given day, the county seat, Monterey, is usually the coldest spot in Virginia.

For 86 years, in fact, Monterey held the record for the lowest temperature ever measured in Virginia - a minus 29 in the great arctic blast of February 1899.

"That was Monterey's claim to fame," says Joe Pritchard, the retired publisher of the county's weekly newspaper, The Recorder. "I ran across it in the World Almanac, and every year, when a new one came out, I always looked to see if we were still in there."

Pritchard was a vigilant defender of Monterey's weather record, too.

For nearly two decades, he tended an official National Weather Service station, a funny-looking box of instruments that sat in a field across the road from his newspaper office. Every day, he would record the highs and lows, take note of any precipitation, and dutifully send off the information to the great federal weather bureaucracy.

But one frigid day in January 1985, an upstart place Pritchard had never heard of - Mountain Lake, in Giles County - seized the state record from Monterey by a single degree.

"We never knew the place existed," Pritchard says. "Down near Blacksburg somewhere, is it? I had two kids at VPI, and I never knew anything about it."

Pritchard vowed a comeback worthy of Joe Montana. He figured it would be only a matter of time before Monterey reclaimed its rightful place atop Virginia's cold-weather throne.

But in 1990, Pritchard retired - from both the newspaper business and the weather business. Four years later, the National Weather Service's Washington office, which runs the nationwide system of volunteer "cooperative observers," still hasn't got around to finding a replacement.

Stations come, and stations go, all the time.

No big deal.

In fact, nobody much noticed Monterey had gone off the map until last week's deep freeze, when the state climatologist's office in Charlottesville started fielding calls from eager-beaver reporters trying to find out what was the coldest temperature in the state.

Climatologist Chip Knappenberger turned to old reliable Monterey . . . and came up with a big fat zero. And we don't mean on the thermometer.

More perplexing yet were the unofficial reports of temperatures in the minus 30 range around Highland County - low enough to set a record, except for one thing.

They're unofficial.

Which means, in the eyes of the weather record-keepers, they don't exist.

Curious, sure. Intriguing, of course.

But officially, nonexistent.

That's because official weather records must be measured on an approved National Weather Service thermometer. And even those must be set up in specially designed boxes with louvered doors to regulate the air flow.

You can't just nail any old Mail Pouch thermometer up against the barn door.

If you do, exposed thermometers are likely to pick up "radiational cooling" - a fancy scientific term that says, in effect, that when there's snow on the ground, it'll make the mercury go kerflooey at night.

You know how, if you put a thermometer in a sunny window, the sunlight will heat up the mercury way beyond what the temperature really is?

"Radiational cooling" is the nighttime equivalent, more or less.

Which means the weather experts basically think all those readings from Highland County are wrong.

"Minus 30 is not out of the question," says Mike Gerber, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service's Washington office, which handles the forecasting for Highland County. But minus 40? "I'm not sure about that."

Knappenberger isn't even that generous. He figures 20 below or 22 below, tops. Or bottom, as the case may be.

Not that he's trying to deprive the folks in Highland County of any climatological glory. In fact, he's kind of sad about the demise of their official weather station. "It's a shame to see a station like Monterey, which goes back to the late 1800s, drop off the map," he says.

Especially when a record-setting cold front may have just plunked itself down smack-dab on the town.

It's like hearing there's a sprinter somewhere who has just run a two-minute mile - only to find no one bothered to set the stopwatch before the meet.

Or hearing that there's a baseball player who has hit .400 - only to find out that the scorekeeper quit in mid-season and no one's been keeping track of his at-bats since.

Or hearing that there's a - well, you get the picture.

"Had I known this was going to happen," Pritchard laments, "I'd have just brought the thing up here and stuck it in my backyard."

Not that it matters too much to the state's unofficial weather record-holder. "You couldn't tell the difference between 10 below and 40 below," Jill Lightner says. "Cold is cold."