By Todd Nelson, filling in for Douglas:
Welcome to the land of 10,000 (frozen) lakes. There aren’t too many places can you turn a banana into a hammer or boiling water into vapor. Cold weather experiments can be fun, but I’m convinced that family members in Arizona think we’re nuts watching TikTok videos of us “embracing” winter.
Consider this week a multicourse dinner to satisfy any wintry appetite. Monday’s cold weather advisory was the appetizer. Are you OK with a side dish of snow (1 to 2 inches) Tuesday into Wednesday? And for the soupe du jour, the chef has prepared near record cold for later this week. Mmmm, that sounds good. I’ll have that.
Extreme cold is rare in the Twin Cities metro these days. MSP has dropped to minus-30 (or lower) only 38 times in history. Never since 2000. The most recent was February of 1996 (minus-32). Temps in the 20s below zeros are becoming rare as well, but we reached that mark three times in January of 2019.
The Arctic front responsible for our cold later this week will also be responsible for a potential major winter storm in the southern U.S. Stay tuned.
