Thursday, February 19, 2009

Last of the Bitterly Cold?


The good news is that meteorological spring starts in less than 10 days. The bad news is that we've jumped into another cold spell. This morning I decided to dig up a statistic to show you that the future is promising.

I scanned through January, February, and March for the years of 2004 -2008. I counted the number of nights that we felt bitterly cold conditions. For this stat, I defined bitterly cold as temperatures below 10°. The five year average showed that we typically dropped into the single digits or lower almost ten times during the month of January. February wasn't a whole lot better with an average of 8.4 mornings with thermometers colder than 10°. The numbers fell significantly once we turned the page over to March. Over the past five years, we have only fallen into the single digits three times.

2009 started off with a frigid first month. We dropped below 10° in 20 of 31 days in January. Thus far in February we have hit this bitterly cold mark 5 times, but we could add at least a couple of days to that tally in the next week. Hopefully we can post a goose egg for the month of March, because I'm pretty sure we've had our fair share of the arctic this winter.

In conclusion, despite the teeth chattering cold today take heart knowing that mornings like today are becoming numbered this late in the season. -ADAM

3 comments:

csanders said...

I wonder if it would be warmer even 200 miles to the south.........Man am I getting cabin fever.

Adam Painter said...

Well Curt, it is warmer 200 miles to the south but I don't think it's worth the road trip. The capital is 200 miles straight south and the current observation as of the noon hour in Springfield is only showing 25° compared to 19° in the Forest City. :-(

Cassi said...

Adam, I am trying to take heart, but it's really difficult with that 6 inches of snow in the forecast! Could you get rid of that? :-)