Coldest night so far this winter across most of Minnesota

Ahh, Minnesota winters.

Welcome to the first of what is likely several “coldest nights so far this winter.”

Our arctic air mass is ideal for plummeting temperatures overnight. A few clouds in eastern Minnesota may hold temperatures up a few degrees, but that’s our only thin hope of avoiding double-digit lows in some locations Friday morning.

No matter where your thermometer ends up tomorrow morning, this will be the coldest night of winter so far for many of us. Thermometers around the inner Twin Cities core should hover around minus 18 Friday morning. Many Twin Cities suburbs will hit 20 below zero.

You may recall the last time it got this cold in Minnesota. The Twin Cities bottomed out at minus 19 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport during last February’s cold wave.

Here’s more on last February’s brutal cold snap from the Minnesota DNR Climate Working Group.

A mild winter that was on its way to the top-10 for warmth broke sharply in early February, plunging Minnesota into a long and sometimes intense cold outbreak.

The cold air mass advanced into the state on February 5th, followed by Arctic reinforcements every few days that only served to prolong and sharpen the cold. Most locations finally returned to above-normal temperatures on February 20th or 21st. Daily temperature departures of 20 to 30 degrees F below normal were common across the state for the majority of the cold snap.

Through February 4th, the lowest temperature recorded in Minnesota for the winter had been -37 F, and International Falls had recorded a seasonal low-to-date of -29 F. By the end of the outbreak, however, International Falls had recorded a low of -42 F, and 23 separate stations in Minnesota had recorded at least one low temperature of -40 or lower. The lowest temperature recorded by an official National Weather Service Cooperative observer was -50 F at Snowbank Lake, 25 miles east of Ely, on February 13th and 14th.

The magnitude of the cold was by far the greatest of winter, but this event was not among the "greats" of the climatological record. Although the -50 F readings near Ely on the 13th and 14th appear to be statewide records for those dates, the records join over 50 other dates on the calendar with statewide records that cold--or colder. No station with a record length of over 60 years set an all-time low temperature record. In short, it was very cold indeed, but it was not a historically cold outbreak.

The duration of this subzero cold snap won’t even register a blip on the all-time records. Late February’s streak of 238 straight hours was the third longest streak on record for February.