Broke Old Record By More than One Degree

If you have been a long time resident of the Tennessee Valley you may have been asking yourself, “When was the last time a new year started out being this cold?” The answer, “NEVER!” The first 10 days of 2010 were the coldest first ten days of a calendar year in the Tennesee Valley. The average temperature during those ten days at Huntsville International Airport was 24.8 degrees. This broke the old record of 26.1 degrees set in 1942. Muscle Shoals also saw a new record for the same time period, with an average temperature of 24.6 degrees. The old record in the Shoals was 24.8 degrees, also set in 1942.

However, this is not the coldest ten day stretch on record.  For Huntsville, that record was set during the time period between January 19th and 28th in 1940 when the average temperature was a frigid 14.9 degrees! For Muscle Shoals, the record was set February 6th through 15th, 1899, with an average temperature of 15.1 degrees.

Here is a grphic depicting the cold for the first ten days of the year in the Valley. Please note the scale uses temperatures in Celcius and not Fahrenheit. That means the -10 being shown is aproximately 18 degrees below normal Fahrenheit!

It has also been a cold start for most of the United States, especially the Southeast as the below image depicts. Again, please note the scale utilizes temperature in Celsius and not Fahrenheit.

As a whole, the meteorological winter, beginning December 1, 2009, is off to a cold start for much of the U.S. including the Tennessee Valley and that is fitting the Storm Force 31 Winter Outlook very well.

Here is how the outlook forecast matched up with actuals for the month of December:

• Temperatures were forecast to be slightly below normal. The actual report was 0.6 degrees below normal, or a tad below, for Huntsville . It was a bit colder in the Shoals with an average monthly temperature that was 1.4 degrees below normal; still in the slightly below category.
• The outlook was forecasting 8 days to have a maximum daily temperature of 45 degrees or less. At Huntsville we had 10 days meet that criteria. In the Shoals, 11 days met the criteria.
• The outlook also forecast 9 days to have a minimum daily temperature of 25 degrees of less.  We missed that mark a bit as both Huntsville and Muscle Shoals. In Huntsville, only 3 days met that criteria while the Shoals had 5.. However, if you would use 26 degrees or less that changes to 6 days in Huntsville and 7 days in the Shoals.
• The outlook predicted near normal precipitation. The actual end result was a wetter than normal December in Huntsville while it was near normal in the Shoals.
• The outlook predicted snow to be well above normal with 3.3″. We had snow but not enough to meet the forecast. Huntsville only officially reported 0.3″ and the Shoals only officially reported a “Trace” However, as much as 1.6″ was reported in Hollytree (Jackson County) and in Union Grove (Marshall County).

Dale Bader /Meteorologist, Storm Force 31

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 1:02 pm and is filed under weather conditions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.