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The ice covers the shoreline of Lake Michigan Wednesday in Chicago. (Photo by Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Angela Fritz
Extreme weather, natural disasters, climate change
January 31 at 12:41
Temperatures dropped by more than 30 degrees below zero Thursday morning in the Midwest during the last gasp of this polar vortex epidemic, resulting in wind chills and historic records. More than 680 temperature records have been broken or tied this week, according to the Midwest Regional Climate Center.
Conditions in northern Minnesota went nose high early in the morning. The non-Cotton community measured a true temperature – not a wind chill – of minus 56 degrees. Four degrees from the lowest temperature of all time in Minnesota.
At the Duluth National Weather Service, forecasters thought the region could beat the record before the sun came up, when temperatures would be coldest, Geoff Grochocinski, a meteorologist, told The Post. The current record of minus-60 was set near the city of Tower in 1996. The conditions should have been perfectly aligned for this to happen, said the meteorological service.
Update: We did not record the coldest Minnesota air temperature record of all time, being -60 degrees (set in 1996) that night. We arrived within 4 degrees of a tie! Cotton, MN dropped to -56 degrees early this morning.
– NWS Duluth (@NWSduluth) January 31, 2019
The cold snap beats all-time records in northern Illinois. The state could record a new low-temperature record as early as Thursday morning, after Mount Carroll dropped to minus 38 Thursday morning. The temperature was measured by a qualified weather observer, according to the national meteorological service. The data will be reviewed by the meteorological service and the state climatologist to be certified as the minimum temperature of Illinois. It would supplant the current record of minus 36 degrees set in Congerville on January 5, 1999.
Moline, Illinois, hit a new low on Wednesday night – the lowest temperature ever recorded by the city. The meteorological station at Moline's Quad-City airport sent a reading minus 29 degrees at 23:19, which was enough to break the record, then continued to drop even earlier Thursday morning. At 7 am, the lowest temperature reached by Moline was minus 33 degrees, five degrees lower than the previous record of minus 28, set in 1996.
Rockford, Ill., Hit minus 30 degrees at 6:45 am CST, which broke the previous record of minus 27 recorded on January 20, 1982.
[Polar vortex death toll rises as Arctic blast keeps the Midwest in a deep freeze]
The Norris camp in northwestern Minnesota was the coldest spot in the United States Wednesday after temperatures dropped to minus 48 degrees Celsius, measured by a Minnesota Department of Natural Resources official. With winds of 5 to 10 mph, the wind chill would have been minus 65 degrees. Several other areas of Minnesota and North Dakota have plunged to dangerous levels, including Warren, Minnesota (under 47); Lisbon, N.D. (minus-46); and Park Rapids, Minnesota (minus 42).
Wednesday was the second coldest day in Chicago history. The maximum temperature, minus-10, was set just after midnight, and then the mercury fell to -24 later in the morning. The combination of these extremes gives a daily average of minus 17, a little less than December 24, 1983, while the average temperature was minus 18 in the windy city.
Tom Skilling, a long-time meteorologist at WGN-TV in Chicago, said that calling the weather brutal was a euphemism.
[Lake Michigan is a frozen wonderland and the photos are perfection]
"Lake Michigan has taken on the appearance of a boiling cauldron. An air less than 20 degrees colder came into contact with water just above the frost level, "Skilling said in his report. "I have lived here for 40 years and I have never seen such a spectacular show of" sea smoke "until today."
Arctic air will tighten in the Midwest by Thursday afternoon; temperatures could even approach zero degrees in Chicago and Milwaukee. By the end of the day, daytime temperatures will be above freezing in most of the Midwest.
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