A cold front to boast about

Posted at 12:36 PM on January 30, 2008 by Craig Edwards

Forty years ago, the Weather Bureau would have posted headlines on Monday morning of a COLD WAVE WARNING; arctic blast arriving Tuesday. Progress in the nation’s leading weather service has replaced that banner with WIND CHILL WATCH. Which do you think makes more sense?

The tumble on the thermometer, beginning under the cover of darkness, prepared Minnesotans to brace for the slap of frigid air on Tuesday. By all measures, this is downright brutal cold. That’s why I usually am cautious in choosing chilly adjectives as the winter progresses. Using brutal cold to define temperatures near zero is quite acceptable in early December. But what would be left to describe the cold of the past twenty-four hours?

Wind chill readings at the bus stop this morning were dangerous. Exposed skin was likely to freeze in minutes. Thankfully there is a light at the end of the tunnel on our journey through this recent blast of Old Man Winter. To put this cold spell into historical perspective I’d like to reminisce about the wind chill index of 2001.

Enjoy yourself in playing the wind chill wheel of danger by entering data to calculate the new and the old index. For an example, at daybreak today in Duluth a temperature of minus 21 with a wind of 16 mph resulted in a wind chill index of minus 47. The old wind chill factor would have taken that down to minus 61.
New versus old wind chill index

Our friends at the climate office put together a nice summary of the swing in temperatures that occurred from Monday to Tuesday.

Extreme 24 hour temperature change
CE

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