Record Watch - Cold Start to April

It looks like the weather is finally turning today - not necessarily to spring just yet, but at least to not-January. Let's take a look back at this cold first week of April.

Low Temperatures

This chart shows the 50 coldest recorded Low temperatures for the week of April 1st through 7th, going back to 1880.

Our lowest Low this week was -18°C on the 1st, which was the 33rd coldest day for this week. The 2nd and 6th both hit -17.7°C, which was good enough for 38th coldest temperatures.

As cold as it was this week, we can see that we were still well above the record Lows for the week. The warmest of the cold records is -21.7°C for April 3, set in 1982. All of the other records are down around -25°C, with the coldest being -26.1°C for April 4th, set in both 1911 and 1920.

With 3 days in the bottom 50 we tied 1982, 1948 and 1888. The year with the most cold days in this list was 1920, with all 7 days. And the decades with the most days were the 1920s and 1930s, each with 10 days total.

This coldsnap didn't start on April 1st, but actually went back to the end of March. In that 2-week stretch we set 6 recent (since 1996) records for coldest Lows.

High Temperatures

Here we have the 50 coldest High temperatures going back to 1880.

Cold High temperatures aren't as exciting as coldest Lows, but this week we did set an all-time record for coldest High on April 5th, at -8.8°C. The previous record had been -7.8°C set in 1948. The High yesterday of -8.6°C also made the coldest-50, but was a bit warmer than the April 6th record of -9.4°C from 1945.

The Highs are a bit crazy though, because the records are across a huge range: from  down at -18.3°C for April 1st and -16.7°C for the 3rd, all the way up to only -6.7°C for April 7. And speaking of April 7 our forecast High for today is only -8°C, so it's possible that we'll break another record today. We'll check back in tomorrow with an update.

Here are the temperatures for April 5th, and with a Low of -14.6°C we were well above 1948's record of -23.9°C. But the High of  -8.8°C beat out all other competitors.

And here we have one last look at the High temperatures for this entire coldsnap. We've set 3 recent records so far, with the potential for a 4th today.