How cold was the coldest winter in Minnesota?

I stopped into the local Irish pub tonight to grab a beer and watch the Timberwolves game.  The Wolves were in form.  They kept the game within 20 points against the juggernaut Utah Jazz until the final minutes.  If it wasn’t within the final 10 games of the season, if I wasn’t an absolute glutton for punishment in following my favorite NBA team, and if a decent question hadn’t arisen, it would have been a total dud of a Monday.  As it happened, as almost always at the local pub, you start shooting the bull, and it turned out that the fellow next to me had moved to Minneapolis from Alabama.  The guy had moved to Minnesota in December.  Shockingly, he thought the past winter had been pretty cold.  That got me to wonder what was the coldest winter in Minnesota?  How does this year stack up?  I’m clearly running out of steam on this project, but here it goes.

First, it appears that weather data in Minnesota has been collected since 1820.  That initially strikes me as pretty wild.  In 1820 there were 22 states, Minnesota did not come into the Union until 1858 as the 32nd state.  Apparently the weather in Minnesota was a concern back then too, it must have taken 38 years before a livable winter came along and Washington gave the go-ahead to add a state in “The North”.  So, anyhow, there is a slew of weather data.  How cold can it get?

In January 1888, the temperature in Minneapolis dipped to -41 Fahrenheit.  That’s a pretty cold day.  “According to the National Weather Service, frostbite can occur within 5 minutes in temperatures between 0 degrees and -19 degrees Fahrenheit.”  So, getting out of the sod house that day would have been a bad idea, but it must have been a fluky day, right?  Sadly, as I am finding out now, it wasn’t.  Apparently “a series of phenomena, including the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa in August, 1883, created an atmospheric shield against solar radiation that plunged the globe into the deep freeze from 1882 to 1888. In the long gaze of history, the powerful blizzard of Jan. 12, 1888 was a final exclamation point.”  That final explanation point was “The Children’s Blizzard”.  I think my Mom read that book and told me about it.  I’d forgotten and feel like kind of a punk now trivializing the temperature in my stupid weather post.  That was a real tragedy.  I’ve got to regroup, though, and I lived through the arctic vortex of 2014, so 1888 had the coldest day, but was it the coldest winter on record in Minneapolis?

Those of us who lived in Minneapolis in the winter of 2014 were not alone in thinking that we had just endured unrivaled misery temperature-wise, but, amazingly we were wrong.  So says “Minneapolis/St. Paul Expert” Clara James, “[t]he coldest winter season in Minneapolis/St. Paul . . . was 1874-75 with an average temperature of just 4 Fahrenheit.”  What’s more, “[a]nd how does 2013-2014 measure up? As of February 28, the average temperature was 9.7 Fahrenheit, putting it in contention for one of the top ten coldest winters on record for the Twin Cities.”  So, it was pretty cold, just not singularly cold. 

This year then?  I remember a couple of days that may have dipped below zero this year, but what’s the average temperature been like?  Apparently Minneapolis averaged around 18 Fahrenheit this winter and was on the warmer end of the spectrum.  I noticed it, but to someone from Alabama, I could see how it would seem cold, their average winter temp this year was around 43 degrees.  So, I guess in the end, this year was not really cold in Minnesota.  Hope if I move to Arizona in July and remark that it seems hot in the summer that someone doesn’t take me for ill-informed.