Drama-free weather well into next week
Our weekend looks to be quiet with fairly normal afternoon temperatures. Low clouds will remain abundant and will prevent overnight temperatures from plummeting. Look for low temperatures Friday night in the teens and highs on Saturday in the 20s. Temperatures should be a bit cooler on Sunday, but we might be able to enjoy partly sunny skies by then.
Stormy East Sunday
Sunday will see a strong storm that had been passing well to our south reach the East Coast with heavy snow in New York and New England, lots of rain and possible severe storms in the South, and messy mixed precipitation in between.
Monday is likely to bring us our mildest temperatures of the next week or so. Highs should be from the mid 20s to the low 30s. Flurries are possible.
The storm track will remain to our south
A major storm is likely to pass by to our south about next midweek. Snow could fall as far north as southern Wisconsin but probably miss Minnesota, per current forecast models.
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Temperatures to turn cooler next week
Cooler temperatures will begin to arrive on Tuesday. Expect highs from the mid teens to low 20s from Tuesday through Thursday.
Alberta Clipper late next week
An Alberta Clipper could bring us a few inches of snow in about the Thursday-Friday timeframe. Then Friday would be a colder day leading into a colder next weekend.
Winter low temperatures in Minnesota aren’t what they used to be
The latter half of January is, on average, the coldest part of the winter in Minnesota. But these days the nights usually don’t get as cold as they did not too far in the past.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration computes daily average low and high temperatures for every date of the year for various locations. They use the previous three decades of data for the computations and revise the numbers every ten years to stay current.
For example, the average temperatures we are using now in 2023 are computed from the measurements taken from 1991-2020. The next re-compute will be after the 2030 data are complete.
In our current database of average temperatures for the Twin Cities, the coldest daily average low temperature is 8 degrees from Jan. 15-29. Forty years ago, in the 1980s, the average daily low temperature for this same part of the month (based on data for the period 1951-1980) was zero degrees.
That’s an amazing eight-degree overnight warming of the depth of winter within my adult lifetime. That the data are not faulty is born out by similar increases in nighttime winter temperatures at other weather stations in Minnesota and surrounding states.
Going way back, Minnesota was absolutely frigid on this date in 1888. The Twin Cities had a low temperature of 32 below, followed by a high temperature of 17 below.
The next morning, Jan. 21, 1888, brought the Twin Cities a record low of 41 below. That’s the coldest temperature of official weather records for the Twin Cities.