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"  As Super Bowl week ramps up, one of the main non-Richard Sherman media storylines is bound to be the weather. The big game typically goes to cities in Florida or California. Super Bowl XLVIII, scheduled to kick off Sunday night from New Jersey&amp;#039;s Metlife Stadium, is the first NFL title game to be contested outdoors in a northern city since before the Super Bowl existed. The league is going to great lengths to make sure the February weather in the New York metropolitan area doesn&amp;#039;t spoil the spectacle, starting with the lucky few who&amp;#039;ll watch from inside the stadium. &amp;quot;We are embracing this first-ever, cold-weather Super Bowl played in an open-air stadium and encourage fans to do the same,&amp;quot; NFL officials say. The game&amp;#039;s host committee has provided a handy clothing-layering chart for those who might not be familiar with getting dressed for a cold-weather game. Before the roughly 80,000 fans even get to their seats they&amp;#039;ll have a warm welcome, walking through one of the seven heated Welcome Pavilions\u2014soft names for security checkpoints\u2014en route to the stadium gate.  Once inside, fans can dig into their toasty goodies\u2014on their MetLife Stadium seats, fans will find a &amp;quot;warm welcome kit.&amp;quot; The extra-large package of souvenir goodies includes three pairs of hand warmers, commemorative Super Bowl ear muffs, a hand muffler\u2014which can even clip to your belt, so leave your fanny pack at home\u2014a ski gator for use as either a bandana or scarf, lip balm, and tissues. The fans aren&amp;#039;t the only concern; the league is also worrying about keeping the many stadium employees warm on Super Bowl Sunday. Kitchen crews have prepared for bad weather by premaking sauces and doing any other work they can ahead of the game, in case a major storm puts the chefs from 30 venues across the country behind schedule. The big question, though, is whether the game will see snow. New Jersey will have about 900 snowplows on standby for the Super Bowl, plus thousands of gallons of liquid calcium chloride and 60,000 tons of salt within 30 miles of MetLife to keep traffic moving around the stadium. The stadium itself has six plows and 30 front-end loaders and other trucks to keep Metlife and its exterior clear of winter weather. The stadium&amp;#039;s snow-clearing system has gotten plenty of practice already this season, thanks to a few snowstorms having hit the Northeast. At Metlife workers manually shovel the stadium clear and send snow through chutes to lower levels where it gets pushed outside and toward MetLife&amp;#039;s large snow-melting machine. That machine can turn 600 tons of snow into water every hour. As for the playing surface, the UBU synthetic turf with a rubber and sand infill doesn&amp;#039;t pose the same challenges as natural grass during inclement weather. However, a frozen or very wet field could mean added injury concerns for the Seahawks and Broncos, so the surface has been tent-tarped since December, with warm air blowing underneath. Crews even painted the field under cover of the tarps. Once the tarps come off, the MetLife Stadium surface will likely stay sans snow in any weather event, as the organizers have an arsenal of blowers and plows on hand.  Whether fans stay warm, though, will be up to them\u2014even with the goodie bags. After all, this is New Jersey in February.  Tim Newcomb covers sports and infrastructure for Popular Mechanics. Follow him on Twitter at @tdnewcomb. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a9973/how-to-survive-the-first-frigid-super-bowl-16426900/>