Snow Day

The Twin Cities metro area is really getting hammered with one of our classic March blizzards. Down here in Northfield, we've received less snow that they have further north, but it's the thickest, heaviest, wettest stuff imaginable - like wet concrete. These sorts of storms always set off discussion of whether winters are different nowadays than they were in years past - usually, "when I was growing up." To help settle that question, a Twin Cities skiing website has just published an analysis of snowfall and temperatures in the Cities (pdf). It's well worth reading in its entirety, but the gist of it is that

the Minneapolis area has a very wide range of conditions during the winter months with significant changes from one year to the next. Our recent winters are not all that unusual compared to other winters going back to 1840 or so. The other notable thing I found was that the winters during the 1970’s and early 80’s were very, very good... It was during this time frame that many of us developed our own personal sense of what a “normal” winter is like. The unfortunate truth is that these years were truly exceptional and not representative of what is “normal”.

The cold, snowy winters of the period from roughly 1975-1985, in other words, probably endowed a lot of us lifelong inhabitants of the Upper Midwest with a false impression of just what winter should be.

Two other points are worth mentioning. According to the data, "while our recent winters have been warmer than typical, they were not all that unusual for the years from 1880 to the present." And then there's this prompt to think again why the hell we live here: "There is a 90 to 100 degree range between record highs and lows in January! During the summer months the range is only 50 to 60 degrees." The only other place on the planet with comparable high-low swings in central Asia - you know, great places like Siberia and Mongolia.