From: NewsOK.com
The coldest temperature ever recorded in Oklahoma was set today.
The Oklahoma Mesonet weather station at Nowata reached minus 31 degrees Fahrenheit actual temperature at 7:40 a.m. today. That will be considered for the official state record.
That mark eclipses the previous all-time record low state temperature of minus 27 degrees, set at at Vinita, Feb. 13, 1905, and Watts, Jan. 18, 1930.
Also, the Mesonet station at Medford recorded a wind chill of minus 47 degrees at 7:45 a.m. setting a Mesonet record.
The Oklahoma Mesonet, which began in 1994, has 120 stations throughout Oklahoma.
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Hey Watts, you just went down! 🙂
Where is the -31F:
“That’s me in the corner. That’s me in the spotlight. I’m Losing my global warming religion…
stephen richards says:
February 10, 2011 at 11:11 am
He may not get the chance. The GOP has called for a reduction of $379million in NASA’s budget.
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Gosh, I hope they don’t have to farm out the muslim outreach program too!
@ur momisugly Sunfighter (10:26 am post): We recently had a dump like that over a 48 hour period and it was enough to turn many of us winter weather-hardened Canuckers into crybabies. At the end of the snow we had almost 70 cm`s on the ground and it took our experienced team of grader operators over two weeks to catch up on clean-up in the city. Still, we did not break any old standing snowfall records from the 1950s.
25 inches is pretty brutal. I imagine people there are having a hard time coping. Good luck! Good thing global warming froze all of that precipitation into snow for ya`ll or there would surely be massive flooding!
/sarc
@ur momisugly OK S.
Usually the really freak kind of cold records, such as Tower, MN’s -60, occur in valleys. That station is most definitely not in a valley. Truly amazing, considering how many places, scattered across a hundred miles, tied or broke that old record.
Everyone knows that warmer air can hold more cold air, hence the low temperatures. All of this was predicted by the models.
So that’s where [our] -30F went
-35 C ? That’s nothing here in Norway.
Magnus says:
February 10, 2011 at 11:00 am
Your # 2 is not proven, no matter how the data is analysed.
If warmer than ever air/sea water is getting up to the Arctic, then the Polar Air masses that get down this way must be likewise warmed up, else the heat that travelled up to the Arctic is missing.
I repeat, the heat that has travelled up to the Arctic is not accounted for by the coldest ever Arctic Air masses getting down stateside.
Your heat is just as much missing as Trenberth’s, and the travesty is measured in the millions of lives that are impacted this morning across the greater portion of a shivering America.
“”””” slp says:
February 10, 2011 at 10:47 am
Juraj V. says:
February 10, 2011 at 10:00 am
Fahrenheit scale sucks.
For the rest, it is -35°C.
First, -31 in either Fahrenheit or Centigrade is really, really cold. Second, Fahrenheit works better for weather since the majority of measurements fall within the range of 0 to 100, and is a bit higher resolution eliminating the need for fractions. Third, it is a trivial conversion. You are just not accustomed to its use. “””””
That’s about the weakest rationalization for some choice, that I have ever read.
And if it’s a trivial conversion, then nobody should have any problem converting from Celcius to Fahrenheit, should they ?
Since the extreme range of temperatures on earth, not counting volcanoes, is about +/- 90 deg C, what is so special about zero to 100 deg F
Well we could easily fix the resolution of the Celcius thermometer, by simply making the boiling point of water to be 1000 deg C, instead of 100; there problem solved and almost five times more resolution than Fahrenheit.
This argument is about as sensible as asking who wants to buy “2 x 4 s” in 30.48 cm increments.
The F scale was dumb when it was invented, and time hasn’t made it any less dumb.
Roughly 10 days ago we hit -47 F. in Fraser Colorado. But I didn’t hear anyone mention a record. I believe the state record is around -61. I’m hoping that it kills some of the pine borer beetles up there.
4th generation Okie here . . . The lowest temp I remember was -10 in 1976. The electricity went out, too. Even though the wall heater had gas heat, the blower was electric. So you couldn’t tell the house had heat at all!
Today it got down to -15 before I left for work.
BTW some of the forecasts have us up in the 70s in about a week. Yeah, we have 4 seasons here. Sometimes all in the same month!
It was -23F here this morning and the power was off for 2 hours. I suspect they were rationing the electricity. Thank goodness for the wood stove. Last week I thought -7F was cold.
How can this be? They keep telling me that CO2 traps heat!
John Kehr said: “The last time a state set an all time temperature record was 16 years ago…”
This is not true. A new state record low for Maine was officially recognized at -50 F on Jan 16, 2009: http://capitalclimate.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-maine-all-time-record-low.html
My complements to Anthony Watts. Who else could slip in an REM song lyric so seamlessly?
I grew up in Michigan and lived in Amarillo,TX for a little over 10 years (long enough to know how to speak fluent Texan). The worst snow storm I had ever encountered happened back in the early 90s in Amarillo (which is only a few hundred miles directly east of OK City). I was smart enough to stay home from work when the snow started. Even though I had a 4WD truck I never would have made it home. My wife was (trapped) out of town and I was literally snowed in for 4 days with a horse, 3 dogs and 2 cats to take care of. It was bitterly cold. There were areas of bare ground right next to 15 foot drifts. I had to wait for a front end loader to show up and clear the road. As luck would have it I had stocked up on beer and provisions the day before the storm hit so I rode it out OK. As they say in that corridor of I-40 – there’s nothing between them and the arctic circle except barb wire fences.
All time record low in a state breaking a record from 106 years ago. I don’t care too much about the day to day temperature records since those can be set very frequently just based on timing of the cold/warm air masses from year to year, but an All time Record low by 4 degrees F, that’s impressive and noteworthy
John Kerr,
Actually, no. It’s surprisingly hard to find current data for highs by state, but it looks like South Dakota had its daily high in 2006, and Utah may have in 2007, etc.
Regarding the 1930’s:
The GISS contiguous 48 state US data says that the average anomaly of the last 11 years was 0.67 deg C ( source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt )
To compare:
– 4 years in the 1930’s were hotter than this *in the US* (1931, 1934, 1938, 1939).
– Several other years in the 1930’s (in the US) were not very hot.
– The 11 year average anomaly for 1930-1940 was 0.39 deg C. (again, for the US48), 0.28 deg C lower than this decade- about half of the global difference for the same periods-
– For reference, the difference for the average anomaly between 2000-2010 and 1930-1940 for the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index is 0.56 degrees.
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ (you can come back here after to cleanse yourself)
Sunfighter–you just misunderstood. They didn’t say 2-5 inches, they said 22 5 inches. See, they were only off by 3 inches.
Forecast for the next ten days.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp1.html
Febuary History of US
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl
Will we beat 1936? Febuary average 32.5.
All this AGW is bound to spark a revolution just like it did in Eqypt according to Paul Krugman!
Well, the wind velocity portion of the temperature is not being factored in. Didn’t the warmists claim that the missing troposheric hot zone (AGWs fingerprint) is there if you include energy associated with wind velocity?
I feel it now. Don’t all you Oklahomans feel it? Warm, isn’t it.
Not just plumbers but roofers and remodelers …. If you’re short on work, head for Okla. Heavy snow followed by extreme cold, on roofs that aren’t designed for it = lots of bent or weakened roofs, and nearly universal ice dams, nearly universal leaks and floods when it starts to thaw.
It is interesting to consider the practical consequences of such low temperatures. I had a large tanker in drydock in Sweden, in winter. The temperature was in the minus 30’s (C). That was the air temperature. The river water was about minus 4C. So the yard informed me that they were going to flood the dock and float the ship out, onto a repair berth. I mentioned the temperature differential, which they ignored, after all they were Swedish, experts in this weather, whereas I was what? An Englishman, didn’t know nothing about cold. True but I could imagine a huge temperature differential having a negative effect. So I wrote them a protest note, holding them responsible, copy to my boss, in Monaco. My boss, in temperatures of about 12C, considered I was a bit of a wimp, told me to trust the yard’s experience. Well, I didn’t, but I was covered. So the flooding went ahead. The ship was 55000 tons, and the volume of the dock was perhaps 100,000 tons. So all this warm -4C water surged in (it’s quite exciting witnessing a large drydock flooding) the -35C dock, and suddenly with a loud bang, the ship split in two. So they had to insert a completely new midsection, at their own expense. You must be careful of cold in more ways than one.
Doesn’t it have to be “homogenized” before we know if its a record? From what I recall, this will require a “downward homogenization” of prior temperature records, at which point this will be the 3rd from coldest temperature recorded.
Dr. Dave says: “…As they say in that corridor of I-40 – there’s nothing between them and the arctic circle except barb wire fences…”
…An’ half o’ the barbs is blown offa them.
Snow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, too:
http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/snow_model/images/full/National/nsm_swe/201102/nsm_swe_2011021005_National.jpg