Storms start to move out of Minnesota, continue for western Wisconsin

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Bundle up, weather fans. This could be the coldest night of the entire winter for parts of Minnesota, including the Twin Cities. 

A Groundhog Day arctic front is pumping in another subzero Canadian air mass. Temperatures will crash into the minus 10s in southern Minnesota with minus 20s to minus 30s up north. 

I wouldn’t be shocked to see some colder northern Minnesota locations like Embarrass or Kabetogema approach minus 40 early Friday morning. 

Wind chill warnings are out for northeastern Minnesota. Wind chills in the minus 40s to near minus 50 degrees will occur overnight into early Friday across northeastern Minnesota. 

Wind chill advisories include the Twin Cities and most of Minnesota from the northwestern through the Iowa border. 

This will be one of those nights where you could hear trees or the lumber in your roof cracking with loud audible pops as the wood suddenly adjusts to extreme temperatures. 

This powerful cold snap will be relatively brief. Temperatures will climb rapidly Saturday afternoon. Highs around 30 degrees should reach well into central Minnesota by Saturday. 

The warm spell kicks into a higher gear by Monday afternoon. Highs in the upper 30s to near 40 degrees look likely across southern Minnesota. 

And check out those 60s down in Missouri. It won’t be that long folks:

Right now it looks like our milder air mass may linger through most of next week. This may be the last subzero night in much of Minnesota for at least a week and possibly much longer. 

Twitter changes may affect severe weather warning dissemination 

Twitter sent out this tweet Thursday indicating a transition to a paid application programming interface (API) service that would impact automated NOAA and other severe weather warning and information platforms.

This forecaster from NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center picked up on the potential impact of this change. It could impact thousands of National Weather Service and other weather accounts like the Iowa Emergency Management IEMbot project. 

It could mean the loss of critical public safety and severe weather warnings for millions of people. 

I reached out to Joe Moore with the Duluth NWS office today about this. Like many of us, NWS still doesn’t know the full impact here, but they are watching. 

Remember, you should always have multiple severe weather safety nets and weather sources like 

, wireless emergency alerts on your phone, radio, TV, and other sources.

Stay tuned as we watch how this will, or will not shake out. 

Paul Huttner

Author

This could be the coldest night of winter for parts of Minnesota. 

Coldest night of winter for parts of Minnesota; warmer weekend ahead

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