Yesterday I watched the mercury on our thermometer sink. It was about 18 degrees when I got up; when I went to bed, it was 8 degrees below zero. This morning it was 12 degrees below zero with a wind chill of about 30 below, and we are likely to remain below zero for three or four days in the Twin Cities. The forecast for today is a high of minus 5.

We received ample notice of the cold weather. For several days weather forecasts predicted the arrival of a cold front from Siberia by way of Canada, and they were right on target.

The last several winters in the region have been mild, I’m told, so people are making more fuss than usual about the cold. As cold as it is with these below-average temperatures, it’s still normal to have stretches like this during an Upper Midwestern winter.

Our temperatures, though cold, are still above record lows. The low temperature record for Minnesota, 60 degrees below zero, was set in 1996 in the northern town of Tower. That same winter I was in the Twin Cities, and I remember it being around 35 degrees below zero at the coldest there–probably the coldest temperatures I have ever experienced. We are also unlikely to match the record for the longest period of subzero temperatures: the coldest stretch in state history was 186 hours of subzero temperature from December 31, 1911, to January 8, 1912–over a week of really cold weather.

When I learned about that last record, it proved false something that I had told my wife before we moved to Minnesota last summer. I had been trying to give her a realistic picture of winter, and I said that for a week or two the temperature might not rise above minus twenty degrees. I was wrong, I’m glad to say, and in reality it is much warmer. Relatively balmy, right?

Reality changes when temperatures drop well below zero. Mechanisms that worked well at higher temperatures no longer work. A car’s antifreeze, usually mixed at 50 percent water and 50 percent antifreeze, begins to freeze at 34 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The chemicals put on roadways no longer melt ice. Mercury in thermometers freezes at 38 degrees below zero. Someone who once lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, told me that at really low temperatures car tires freeze; when you start driving the tires clunk for a while, because the tire retains the flat shape where it rested on the ground (this has never happened to me here in the Upper Midwest). There is always the nose test too: when the temperature drops below zero, the inside of your nose freezes as you breathe. This isn’t necessarily dangerous, by the way.

As the temperature dropped yesterday, I decided to get outside and embrace the cold. In return, it slapped me in the face. I bundled up absurdly well and walked only about a half mile or so to a nearby park. I did not cover up the area around my eyes adequately, and walking into the wind was a painful experience. With wind chills this low, the warning is always to cover up all exposed skin.

The world record low temperature, by the way, is 128 degrees below zero, set in Antarctica–illustrating that the Upper Midwest is not really in the same league as polar and subpolar regions. Even Canadian cities to our north are significantly colder than we are. Regina, Saskatchewan, for example, will likely have high temperatures of about minus twenty degrees over the next several days–that’s about twenty degrees colder than here. These people, and those farther north in Canada, Russia, and northern and interior Alaska are greater winter heroes than we.

For comparison, here are average January temperatures (Fahrenheit) for selected northern cities,:

Oslo, Norway: 27
Chicago: 21
Moscow, Russia: 13.5
Minneapolis: 12
Fargo, North Dakota: 6
Novosibirsk, Russia: 4
Regina, Canada: 1
Winnipeg, Canada: -1
Harbin, China: -2.6
Fairbanks, Alaska: -10
Yellowknife, Canada: -13
Yakutsk, Russia (Siberia!): -39

At Vostok 2, Antarctica, the average August temperature is minus 95 degrees. In comparison to that, I live in paradise.

Sources: worldclimate.com, weatherbase.com, and The World Almanac and Book of Facts

Next week: Dressing for winter

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 5:58 am and is filed under Minnesota, Weather, Winter.