Just How Cold Was It?

 I'm guessing most folks have a thermometer, and were surprised by just how cold it was this morning.  Here's a map of the low temperatures measured at numerous locations. As you can see, -20F and colder was common north of Spokane.  The -38F in northwest Montana was at Yaak.


Here's a zoomed in view.


Now, as cold as it was last night, it wasn't "unheard of" cold.  Spokane's coldest temperature ever is -30F way back in 1881.  And they hit -24F back in 1996, my first winter here.  Chewelah hit -38F in the winter of 1950.  Newport dropped to -41F in that same event.  So we can safely say that it has been colder.

But frigid low temperatures are sort of easy to do around here.  With snow on the ground and a calm clear night, the thermometer can drop pretty low.  What's difficult is to keep the daytime high temperature frigid.  That's a better measurement of how cold the air mass really is.  Keeping daytime temperatures below 0F is tough to do around here.  Newport has only done it 6 times since 1909.  Even that -41F night warmed to +1F back in 1950.

So here's the high temperatures for today.  Deer Park only reached 0F, while -4F was the best Colville could muster.



Records for the Deer Park airport only go back to 1998.  But in those 26 years, +4F is the coldest day on record (ironically set last winter).


For Colville, the high of -4F would put them in second place going back to 1889.  That's pretty impressive.



One other notable aspect of this cold snap was the wind chills.  The National Weather Service criteria for a Wind Chill Warning is -20F.  In these parts that's tough to do.  Typically if it's windy, it just can't get that cold due to mechanical mixing.  But in this event, wind chills of -20F were widespread and lasted more than a day.

Temperature-wise, we're through the worst of it.  We'll very slowly starting warming up.  We should make it back above freezing by next weekend.


But the bigger story is the potential for heavy snow midweek.  The usually Bearish ECMWF model is giving Deer Park about 7" of snow, starting Tuesday afternoon and continuing through Wednesday.


Meanwhile the Bullish GFS thinks we'll get about a foot of snow.  


The model consensus is for about 7".  This would be a cold, dry snow.  Stay tuned for updates.






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