A two-fer - first from our own Cliff Mass:
Record-Breaking Cold in Eastern Washington
The cold that has been experienced in eastern WA since early February has been totally amazing. And unlike western WA they have had little relief the past week.
You will not believe the minimum temperatures this morning. Yakima got down to 7°F, with a number of locations around Ellensburg dropped to 2-3F.
Such temperatures are unusual this late in the season, as shown below at several sites in northeast Oregon and southeast WA. Some of the daily low temperature records were smashed by 5-8F. That is significant.
And it is not just the Pacific Northwest, from Texas' Laredo Morning Times:
Montana just endured one of the nation's most exceptional cold spells on record
There's a kind of cold that's legitimately dangerous. It can causes frostbite in minutes to unexposed skin. In parts of the Lower 48 states, such extreme cold is not uncommon, for a few days to at most a week.
But over the entire month of February and even into March, such exceptional, life-threatening cold never departed parts of Montana. Temperatures averaging 20 to 30 degrees below normal gripped huge areas in the state, as well as parts of the Dakotas.
These places are normally cold but this chill was unlike anything seen in the contiguous United States in decades, for both its intensity and its duration.
The February temperature departures from normal were stunning. Several major climate locations averaged 27 to 28 degrees below normal, which were the most extreme in the Lower 48 for a full month since January 1969, according to Alaska-based climatologist Brian Brettschneider.
Great Falls, Montana, was at the heart of it. The mercury didn't rise above zero on 11 days and dropped to zero or below on 24 nights. Only the first day of the month topped freezing. Its average February temperature finished 27.5 degrees below normal.
The punishing and unrelenting cold continued into March. On March 3, the low temperature tanked to a bone-chilling minus-32 in Great Falls. Combined with a high of minus-8, the day finished a whopping 50 degrees below normal. The city concluded its longest stretch on record below freezing on March 7.
Meanwhile, our sun is still very very quiet. One small sunspot cluster (AR2734) but it is fading and heading over the rim of the sun.
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