TheClimateChanger

Wow, that's quite impressive IMO, considering 1991-2020 was, by far, the warmest climatological normal period in recorded history. And the last 20 years are outpacing them by 0.6-1F across the board. One would think the warmer norms would tilt the scale towards more cooler than normal years, but, in fact, one finds the opposite phenomenon. Very intriguing.

Surprised to see some areas of freezing drizzle on my way into work today.

You're welcome, Bob. I didn't bring it up. Just think we should be accurate if we're going to claim the forecasts were wrong for that period. We have a lot of weather forecasters and meteorologists on here, and it's bad enough to be slammed for a missed forecast, let alone forecasts that were correct.

Yeah, now that I think about it... I think it's there CDAS or whatever that shows the past anomalies that always seems to show an anomalously cooler area over Lake Superior. But that might be a problem with the lake temperature dataset.

Shouldn't be that dramatic of a discrepancy though... the 1991-2020 normals are generally ~0.5F, maybe 1F warmer, than the 1981-2010 normals for most places. After all, they share 20 years.

It looks like they fixed whatever always led to a big negative departure over Lake Superior.

I don't think this snow will be any match for the strong February sun angle.

Agreed. Even expanding that out a bit, the period from December 20th to January 10th was the 2nd warmest on record at Tri-Cities Airport and 3rd warmest at Knoxville (exceeded only by a couple of questionable recordings from the 19th century - it was more than 3F warmer than any year since 1890). Yes, it's been very cold since mid-January, but I don't know why some feel the need to carry on with this myth that there was no torch around the Holidays / New Year. The 3-week period centered around New Year's was about as warm as it gets in the Tennessee Valley. Tri-Cities Knoxville

I'm with you guys. This way of ranking makes zero sense to me. I saw Paul/Chesco do the same thing with his 20-day snow cover streak. Turning what was really tied for 36th place with 4 other years into the #22 longest streak, so it went from being something that would occur once every three years [probably even more frequent when accounting for missing data - not sure he actually has 132 years of full data] to much more significant. This gets even more ridiculous the further down the line you go as there are more and more tied values. So it's actually 64th longest sub-40 streak (of 157 years), which is barely above the median - meaning it should occur, on average, nearly every other year, maybe more like 2 out of every 5. Ignoring all the tied values catapults it into some sort of significant cold spell. 18th makes it sound like it's nearly 90th percentile (maybe 1 every 9 years or so). One could imagine a scenario where there are three record cold months tied at 18.9F, and the month ends at 19.2F. Why should it be considered second coldest just because the three colder months happened to end tied at the same value? There's no difference than if the three colder months had instead been 18.7, 18.9, and 19.0F.

Thanks for the update, Paul. I think the surprising thing is how common this really is over there in Western ChesCo. The creative ranking makes it seem more impressive, but really 39 years had as long or longer stretches (of what 132, 133 winters - maybe less if there's incomplete data?). So about 30% of the time assuming full data, perhaps higher. Not too bad - looks like you guys were due for a harsh one with just one such stretch since 2015 prior to the current one! I suppose there's some time to climb on the list still as well this go around. Curious - do you always count ties as only one rank? 22nd longest really makes it sound so much more impressive than tied with 4 other years for 36th longest, which is how it actually ranks unless I'm misunderstanding your data above?

It’s the 10-year sum of total snowfall. Not an acronym. I just wanted to differentiate from an average albeit I could average it by dividing by 10 years.

Snowbirdbob confirms:

UAH TLT data was released this morning. Globally, the anomaly came in at 0.35C, up 0.05C from December. For the CONUS, January 2026 averaged 0.30C above the 1991-2020 mean. The CONUS winter season to date (December & January) is currently the warmest on record (since 1978-79) in the satellite-based dataset, and by a very significant margin over No. 2. The two month average is +1.20C for the CONUS, while the prior record for December & January was set in 2021-22 at +0.91C. Very likely that this will be the warmest winter on record in the CONUS in the UAH TLT data.

I wonder if everyone's thermometers are being impacted by reflected sunlight from the snow? The commercially available ones are generally shielded from above, so reflected light from below could raise them?

Interesting. Looking at everybody's temperature reports, it seems the airport temperatures are usually cooler. But one would think it would be the other way around with all the asphalt?

Very impressive. Do you think this will be the coldest outbreak of the 21st century in Florida?

You can really see how that California tule fog or whatever they were calling it screwed us out of an even warmer December & January.

An impressive 43.2F diurnal range there so far. Can definitely see the effects of that higher sun angle, even with the snow cover. From -14.8F -> 28.4F.

@donsutherland1, what do you think of this projection? When I see a week-long, ensemble average showing an areal anomaly of +3.66F over that big of an area - keep in mind, it's not averaging just the CONUS, but that entire map inset - that looks significant to me. Like possible record-breaking warmth in places.

Some light at the end of the tunnel, especially for our western friends.

Wow! Those were legitimate cold months. Surprised 2015 isn't on that short list as well!