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…
I had someone try to tell me that higher snowfalls were projected in the last IPCC report. So I had to show him that precipitation was actually below normal. Cold air doesn’t hold as much water as warm air obviously!
I wonder if people will start to believe that low solar activity results in colder temps. It’s either that or a big coincidence! And the La Niña combined with the negative phase of the AO.
I thought Oklahoma got cold. That was only 31f below “0”. I’ve seen 41f below “0” in California! Oh well, old time ranchers told me that there was nothing between Texas and the north pole but a few barbwire fences, and also Oklahoma. pg
@A G Foster February 10, 2011 at 10:52 am:
Yes, that infamous anti-thermo-haline circulation (-ATHC), which brings the benefic tornadic air flow that give Oklahoma its wonderful continental climate. /snarc
/super snarc: I take it this is before CRU gets hold of the data, right?
I can verify that it was as cold as I’ve ever seen in my 36 years here in Mayes County, OK. My thermometer showed -18 at 6:45. It may have been colder than that before I woke up. Ridiculously cold. I thought I had frostbite on my hands before my truck got warm on my way to work and I was wearing fleece lined leather gloves and was inside my truck!!!
polistra says:
February 10, 2011 at 12:07 pm
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…
Not to worry, in Oklahoma we usually get a lot worse weather for our roofs. Ice storms and high winds. Most of us have new roofs anyway due to the 1 – 4 inch hailstones from last summers storms. Extreme Climate Change is call tomorrow in OK.
Latitude says:
February 10, 2011 at 10:24 am
You know….
When they break a high record by one degree, you hear it everywhere….
4 degrees below the 81 year record, and not a word
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In February of 1996, the official state record was broken by 1 deg F.
It was a freakin party in Minnesota with TV coverage from several stations and science demonstrations like a styrofoam cup full of hot water thrown into the air and watching it go phoooof into a fog that soon dissipated into nothing in the single digit humidity air.
The NWS box finally showed -60 degs F and the crowd went wild, yes, there was a crowd.
They then proceeded to take a handheld gauge, reading the same temp, and they walked about 200 yds to a hollow where it read -70 degs F.
We take our cold very seriously……in Minnesota……and we’re not in the least embarrassed…..even if it happened in Embarrass, MN. The offical town used is Tower, but it happened at Embarrass also……where all the hoopala was.
Fred from Canuckistan says:
February 10, 2011 at 2:37 pm
One of the benefits of very cold air temps like that is you can chill down a six pack in just a couple of minutes or make a tray of ice for Margeritas really fast.
When Mother Nature freezes your butt off . . . time to bust out the tequila and salt.
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Is the beer just outside the fishhouse on Lake Winnipeg?
I used to live in Minnesota/North Dakota, back in the day.
How do you walk to school, uphill, both ways?
When a gale wind, in the winter, is to your front walking to school, and then the wind changes 180 deg’s by the time you you get out of school……well I imagine this is where some of the stories come from.
Interstate highway 40 has a 75 + mile westbound parking lot from almost West Memphis to N. Little Rock I’m told. Eastbound was sometimes crawling along real slow also.
Remember when Olympian skier Picabo Street led the keep winters cool campaign a few years ago.
Look at this winter in Colorado:
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20110210/NEWS/110219992/1078&ParentProfile=1055
Breckenridge has already passed last years snow totals with the snowiest part of the season still to come.
>> He may not get the chance. The GOP has called for a reduction of $379million in NASA’s budget.
NASA’s Global Warming (boondoggle) budget is a whopping $1 Billion.
Given that, it looks like the GOP is about to fail miserably, in that they left $621 Million to much. Shame, shame, shame on the GOP. /sarc
No need to cry for NASA, even with the reduction their budget would be a whopping $18.6 Billion.
>> Extreme Climate Change is call tomorrow in OK.
Okie Windsock — 2-feet of chain bolted to a fence post
Is this weather station near or on an airport?
Hey, we want our cold back here in Canada. It’s one of the primary things that sets us apart from Americans, that ability to survive under cold conditions and the smugness that comes from functioning in -40 F temperatures while the effete Americans complain about temperatures close to freezing.
Kamloops today was an unseasonable 34 F (when I set my jeeps display to read in mpg it gives temperatures in F degrees). This is completely unacceptable and it should be 0 F or lower at this time of year. I’m seeing too many slip and fall injuries at the clinic due to the ice that forms due the fluctuation of temperature above and below 32 degrees when I should be seeing more interesting stuff. People are depressed because it’s too warm. Our sled dogs are overheating in their winter coats and people are having heatstroke from donning their traditional winter clothes out of habit.
Oklahoma colder than the frozen north?! Just ship all of that frozen air back to us and we’ll send you this unwelcome warmth so we can get back into our normal state of winter superiority at being far colder than Americans.
Thanks for pointing it out, Anthony. We Sooners appreciate it. Yep, it’s been cold. But our snow piles may be gone by next week. Mid-70s seem to be in store. (We made 76°F just two weeks ago.) Will Rogers regularly joked about how rapidly our weather could change. 100°F swings in ten days, and then back in five more–must be why I cannot get excited about predictions of average temperature increases of fractions of a degree per decade. 😉
In my Twitter feed, the story between the previous and next WUWT posts was shown as follows: ‘Coldest month of December in the modern climate record’ for UK http://wp.me/p7y4l-8LC“. The link didn’t work and the entire post seems to have been replaced by this story about OK. Anything up?
REPLY: It’s an old story from last month, just a glitch during managing the blog. – Anthony
A primary reason for the mesonet is the tornadoes we deal with every year.
http://www.mesonet.org/index.php/site/about
oldgamer56 posted the Nowata link above. I didn’t plot the coordinates, but I don’t think it is near the airport, if you can call a crop-duster strip an airport. The airport is just north of town, and town is hardly more than the intersection of US 60 and US 169. (Populaiton close to four thousand.)
We need to record these lowest temperatures and the highest temperatures to see how many records have been broken.
Or does anyone know of an accessible resource that is already doing this ?
32 F = freezing pt of pure water at sea level.
212 F = boiling pt of same
0 F = freezing pt of water with maximum dissolved salt, I think
Makes sense to me.
Fahrenheit rocks!
-31 F in OK is very cold.
Heard from Trenberth’s office:
“Who didn’t get the memo? Hide the decline! It’s three f*/%ing words!”
To get that cold, I bet the small “core” of the arctic high must have made it there intact without major modification. It could only do that by moving quickly there with snow-cover all the way south along its path to OK.
When I was in SW Virginia in Feb 1996, a “core” did the same thing a mere hundred miles to the west. In Blacksburg VA, I was only -8F, but a small cluster of counties in extreme SW Va had all-time lows of -25F to -28F, close to the state all-time record of -30F, which was set Jan 1985 at Mountain Lake (4000′ elevation) near Blacksburg.
George E. Smith: The F scale was dumb when it was invented, and time hasn’t made it any less dumb.
It’s easy to say that in retrospect, but version 0.1 of anything often seems dumb. As the first “official” temperature scale, what would you have proposed he use as his reference points?
Remember, before the Farenheit scale, no one knew that water boiled at the same temperature all the time at atmoshperic pressure, because there was no such thing as temperature. They also didn’t know that it froze at the same point all the time. It may seem obvious now that boiling point should be defined as 100 degrees and freezing point of pure water 0 degrees. And it probably seemed obvious when Celsius came up with that scale decades later. Of course, by that point, there had been about 30 years of research on the physical properties of water using the Farenheit scale that told Celsius pure water always boiled and froze at the same point under constant pressure, and what that constant pressure was.
Farenheit chose a cold reference point that he knew from experiment he could always recreate perfectly and two warmer points that he thought he could recreate close to perfectly (pure water freezing and blood temperature.) Whether he was wrong about the last two or not, they served as solid reference points for his bleeding edge work. And since he was first, his became the standard, right or wrong.
You also must remember that scales that are evenly divisible by 10 seem obvious now because we have them, but at the time of the Farenheit definition, no such scales existed as standards. So instead of making only one advance — the measurement of temperature — he would have had to make two advances, the second one being mathematical and representative in nature. Since he was a physical scientist, it seems unlikely he would have thought in those terms.
As evidence about whether this was dumb at the time, it took over 30 years for someone to suggest using the boiling point and freezing point of water as the two reference points for a temperature scale that would start at 0 and end at 100.
Farenheit’s decision seems dumb now, when viewed in the context of the research that was enabled by his work, a prime example of the chicken and the egg conundrum.
Fahrenheit scale sucks.
For the rest, it is -35°C.
I agree
Fahrenheit is only used in the USA, Palau, Jamaica, Belize and Liberia. The rest of the World use Celsius.
Here in BC, we now pay a 20% carbon tax (ca $1 per gigajoule) on the commodity price of nat gas (ca $5 per gigajoule), and there is no provision for really extreme weather events.
The carbon tax on nat gas will increase to $1.60 per gigajoule in July 2012. At the time the rate of the carbon tax on fossil fuels will be $30 per ton of CO2 equivalent.