It's been a year since our record cold of late January 2019
Coldest wind chills recorded from the late January 2019 arctic outbreak
One year ago this week, Minnesota as well as much of the Upper Midwest, were dealing with cold that hadn’t been seen in at least a couple of decades. A massive and extreme pocket of cold air was shoved southward straight out of the North Pole and ended up in Minnesota just 36 hours later. It was this quick movement and heavy snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere that didn’t allow this air to warm as it headed southward, like many arctic outbreaks have before. This lead to the coldest day in the Twin Cities in a good 25 years.
The Twin Cities spent 76 consecutive hours below zero, experienced one of the coldest calendar day high temperatures of -13° on record, had a record low wind chill of -57°, & a morning low of -28°. Some parts of Minnesota experienced actual air temperatures to the -50s for the first time since the early 90s, when Embarrass recorded the coldest reading ever in the state at -60°.
There were many factors involved in why this occurred that may never happen again… at least maybe not in many of our lifetimes. But what’s interesting to note, is that this cold outbreak is easily one of the top 3 coldest outbreaks in Minnesota since our modern records began back in the 50s. So why didn’t the Twin Cities experience it’s coldest temp on record on -41° if this air mass was that cold?
Well, that -28° is quite the feat now that the Twin Cities is as big as it is. The urban heat island effect is a large player in why temps didn’t get any colder in the metro that morning, and quite likely won’t ever get that cold again. Manmade structures hold more heat, therefore making it harder for the atmosphere near ground level to cool overnight.
The picture above is actually not from the coldest night in the Twin Cities, but is the coldest for every other locations statewide where St Cloud made it to -34° and even Red Wing & La Crosse made it to the -30s. This was also the morning where International Falls broke a daily January record low… something that hadn’t happened in the state since 1996. There were even outlying areas around the metro from St Francis to Ham Lake to Lake Elmo to Lonsdale and Waconia that managed to get as cold as -38°. So the heart of the Twin Cities will likely never experience temperatures in the -30s again… unless something truly unprecedented occurs…. But I think many of us are okay with that. Makes our January of 2020 feel like a tropical paradise.