Suppose to go down to 17 tonight for just a bit(less than half an hour). I’m curious how my in ground figs and pomegranates are going to take it.
Got to 11 this morn, we got a dusting of snow yesterday, so that’ll make it colder tonight. Supposed to be near 0 tomorrow night, coldest in almost 3 years. Sitting at about 21 now (1pm), with 5 forecast for tonight, and single digit lows until Sat.
Both our dog and cat are inside today, thought we’d give them a chance to warm up a bit. Our dog has always been an outside dog, but he is 12 years old, so we worry about this type of cold. He usually doesn’t like to stay in for very long, but we closed the door, so he’s laying down for now.
Thankfully he’s smart enough to go down to the barn at night and sleep in a straw manger we made for him. I don’t think the cold bothers him as much as I think it does, he was laying in the grass/snow when we got home from church today.
The cat is about a year old, and he gets under the house in the crawl space to keep warm. He’s put on a lot of “insulation” this year, but I’m sure he doesn’t care for the cold.
We’ve been diligent about keeping fresh unfrozen water out for them, and giving them a bit more food when it’s this cold.
Next week it’s supposed to be a bit warmer closer to normal- highs in the 40s, so we’re all looking forward to that.
Yeah who knows right now… Looks like some good moderation by NEXT weekend…maybe up to freezing (heat wave!)… I just wonder when the snow shows up… GFS shows us bouncing around after that, but nothing record cold or record warm.
Second week of Jan…shows the cold sitting around,especially across Iowa.
Coldest i’ve got in my yard is -9F…airport shows -8F… but if we had some real snow cover i think -20Fs would be a lock in this pattern…lows this morning:
These cold sunny days do beat the 20F cloudy ones in my book… house warms up nicely… Usually the furnace stays off all afternoon even when its around 0F due to heat gain from a lot of south facing glass.
One of our current cats spent over a year outside on her own before we lured her into the garage. She had the densest coat imaginable. Now, 7 years later, she’s parked in front of the heating vent inside and her coat is much thinner
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Just to make us all feel better, at least this isn’t the winter of 1899. That winter is acknowledged as one of the worst this country ever experienced.
-Every state in the Union (there were then 45) had a recorded temperature below 0 F.
-February 1899 was one of the coldest in record across the South and Midwest. City records that still stand today (I tried to pick at least one from most states):
Georgia: -9 F in Atlanta;
Kansas: -22 F in Wichita
Michigan: -24 F in Grand Rapids, MI;
Tennessee: -20 in Nashville, TN;
Missouri: -25 in Jefferson City
Arkansas: -12 in Little Rock
West Virginia: -25 in Morgantown
Louisiana: 6 in New Orleans, -16 in Minden
Oklahoma: -15 in Oklahoma
Texas: -16 in Amarillo, 11 in Corpus Christi
Alabama: -10 in Birmingham
Maryland: -7 in Baltimore
Pennsylvania: -20 in State College
Nebraska: -47 in Bridgeport
South Dakota: -41 in Sioux Falls
Ohio: -39 in Millington
Florida: -2 in Tallahassee
North Carolina: -5 in Charlotte
South Carolina: -2 in Columbia
Minnesota: -33 in Minneapolis
Wisconsin: -33 in Green Bay
California: 24 in Fresno, 34 in San Diego
-Mississippi River froze solid north of Cairo, IL. Ice chunks choked the river down to New Orleans, and flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.
-Texans could ice skate on the San Antonio River after it froze over.
-Lacking snow cover, the ground froze to a depth of 5 ft in Chicago, breaking innumerable water, gas, and other lines.
-Enough snow fell in Tallahassee that there is a picture of government employees having a snowball fight on the capital steps. New Orleans got 3 inches of snow, and snow fell in Tampa.
So I guess we should be grateful and thank our lucky stars that even though this winter is cold, it is not that cold (at least not yet!)
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Give me a repeat. I think we would need a deep snowcover deep into the midwest/east to get that cold that far south (Atlanta/FLorida/etc). Still lots of winter left.
-13.2F at my house…which is nuts because we have just a layer of fluff on the ground. We’ll start seeing frozen pipes if it isn’t happening already. No snow=no insulation.
GFS shows snow next weekend…a very slight moderation takes place the next week (still cold–single digits, but above zero F)…next weekend we might see our first 20Fs (with the snow)…after that another cold shot around the 10th of Jan…then a more mild pattern is in the works later but that is mid month at this point…ugh…
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-3 here this morning but the sun is out
GOES 16 (newest weather sat) has a floater over Chicago…lake effect clouds clearly showing this morning. Can see the ice forming along the shoreline too.
Philip, SD (just east of Rapid City) was -35F this morning…Glendive, MT in eastern MT was -38F… not too shabby.
Lookslike today may be the year’s coldest
Still with highs above 0 F, tho
I have a book a friend sent me called, “The Peach, The Kansas Peach” which was written immediately after the freeze in 1899. Temps were much colder in other parts of the state that winter, many places below -30F.
It killed most of the peach trees in the state. Six years later (in 1905) was another very severe winter which set the low temp record in KS (-40F in Lebanon KS), probably killing all the peach trees again.
It’s my opinion, these two back to back events pretty much eliminated KS as a major peach state (At the time Kansas was the number three peach state, as measured by acreage devoted to peaches.) As a peach farmer, it would be very discouraging to have all your trees frozen dead, then replant, only to find them frozen to death again, just as they started to come into max production. I’m sure most farmers in the state decided peach growing wasn’t worth it.
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Got hit last night with -17F.
Dax
funny no new england states in there. if it got to -20 in PA I’m sure it was -40 -50 in n. Maine. i can’t imagine living in a poorly insulated cabin like many did in that time period!
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Got to -9 in my location.
I think of that sometimes and wonder. Even worse, how did American Indians live on the plains in tents in sub-zero weather? I imagine bed partners were practically a necessity.
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thats why they all slept together in one. more bodies in there the better! thats how our deer survive up here. they go deep in the swamps where there no wind and lay on the sphagnum moss with dozens huddled together.
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Here in Serbia we almost had no snow this winter, on this image you can see predicted accuweather.com temperatures for this month 
.
Lowest temperatures in December where 19.4 F over night.
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thats oct- nov. weather here.
January 1857 was brutal for Ft Snelling…25 days recorded subzero temps. Ft. Snelling is near modern day Minneapolis Airport. On the 10th of Feb Ft. Ripley recorded -50F …that is NW of Minnapolis. Another station had -56F that morning. Imagine that airmass. Ft. Snelling had something like 100 inches of snow that winter which is pretty crazy…i think they avg around 40 ish.
Where i live it is called the driftless area…the last ice age (ice sheet) didn’t touch this area of WI/MN/Iowa (areas along the Mississippi River) due to geograpy or soil or something…so the whole area would have been surrounded by a sheet of ice. Imagine a summer day in July 10,000 years ago at my house… Wouldn’t need AC!
wiki
The Driftless Area is a region in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northwestern Illinois, and northeastern Iowa of the American Midwest that was never glaciated. Colloquially, the term is expanded to include the broader incised Paleozoic Plateau, which contains deeply-carved river valleys and extends into southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa.[1] The region includes elevations ranging from 603 to 1,719 feet (184 to 524 m) at Blue Mound State Park and covers an area of 24,000 square miles (62,200 km2).[2] The rugged terrain is due both to the lack of glacial deposits, or drift, and to the incision of the upper Mississippi River and its tributaries into bedrock…In earlier phases of the Wisconsinan, the Driftless Area was totally surrounded by ice, with eastern and western lobes joining together to the south of it.