What’s the coldest spot in Minnesota? That question was the subject of last week’s segment on the CBS Sunday Morning news show— and it’s been the focus of friendly competition between the communities of Tower, Embarrass, and International Falls for years.
It’s been dubbed the “cold war,” but the battles in this ongoing conflict are waged with cold hard weather data, not military arsenals. And like many wars, sorting out the victor isn’t always as easy as it might seem.
“Who is the coldest? It’s a degree of definition,” said University of Minnesota climatologist Mark Seeley.
When it comes to record-setting cold, the weather experts agree that Embarrass has been on quite a run since 1994, when the National Weather Service first installed an official station in the community. “If you look at just the last few years, they are the coldest spot,” said Seeley.
Yet, while weather watchers may draw conclusions from a few years worth of data, climatologists track longer term patterns, such as 30-year averages, before deciding how weather stations stack up. And for Embarrass, it’s still too early to call it the winner. “We can’t make that blessing on Embarrass just yet,” said Minnesota State Climatologist Pete Boulay.
There are other complications as well. If you consider long term average temperatures, do you only track average low temperatures, or the mean temperature, which encompasses the average high and low? And do you consider only wintertime temperatures, or consider the annual mean, which is determined by summer weather as well?
“There are a lot of ways to paint cold,” noted Boulay.
While locations like Tower and Embarrass are unquestionably the chilliest in winter, some high elevation locations are chillier when summer temperatures are added in. “On an annual basis, the Mount Washington [New Hampshire] observatory beats everyone,” said Seeley. “They have the coldest annual mean hands down.”
But come the winter months, and even that weather station, located at over 6,000 feet near the peak of Mount Washington, has serious competition. In fact, from December through February, both Tower and International Falls (where weather records have been kept long enough to calculate long term averages) are colder than Mount Washington, at least in terms of air temperature.
Tower’s average January low temperature, of minus 13.8 degrees, is ten degrees colder than Mount Washington’s average minimum of minus 4. Even relatively balmy International Falls, with an average January minimum of minus 8 bests Mount Washington by four degrees.
Indeed, the wintertime temperatures recorded in our area are so cold that even Alaskans have a tough time competing. The average January minimum in Fairbanks, a city located well into the Alaskan interior, is just minus 13, or a degree warmer than at Tower. Fairbanks is slightly colder in December and February, which helps it just beat out Tower for the coldest low temperatures for the primary winter season.
Other Alaskan cities, however, like Nome or Anchorage, don’t even come close to the cold temperatures recorded in Tower.
And while Jack London and Robert Service wrote of the bone-chilling temperatures gold prospectors discovered in the Yukon Territory, the territorial capital of Whitehorse sees an average January low of minus 9.8 degrees, four degrees warmer than at Tower.
Of course, temperature records change over time, and that’s especially the case with Tower, where the location of the official weather station has changed three times in the past ten years. None of the two more recent locations have proven to be quite as cold as when Kathy Hoppa was Tower’s official observer. And that will, over time, likely push Tower’s averages higher.
“I think Embarrass will eventually be the coldest place,” said Roland Fowler, Embarrass’s official observer. “Since Tower’s station was moved to a higher location, they lost four or five degrees,” he said.
While Tower still holds the state’s all-time record low of minus 60, Fowler thinks that given enough time, even that illustrious record will fall.
In this cold war, the balance of power may well be shifting.
I know you all have it very cold in Minnesota. Living in Alaska since 1973, however, I have personally spent time in -80F in Northway, Alaska, and worked for 2 weeks on the North Slope in -70F weather. Both are without wind chill, as there was no wind to be found. Average temps do not make a place colder or not, it would seem that how cold does it get that makes the grade. Kudos to those who live in these cold regions, no matter the records.
alaskasteward
I can't help but think this sounds a bit like a tall tale. According to my research, the coldest temperature ever recorded in North America was minus 81 degrees at Snag airfield in the Yukon Territory in 1947. The coldest temperature recorded in Alaska was in 1971 at Prospect Creek, when it hit minus 79.8, which would qualify as minus 80. But Northway recorded minus 70 on that date. That's mighty cold, but not quite minus 80. This is according to a blog post by a retired Fairbanks meteorologist.
Of course the minus 60 recorded south of Tower in 1996 was not the coldest temperature in our that day. There was a swamp behind the home of the official observer and I took a spare thermometer from her weather box to see how cold it was down in that low spot. The unofficial reading was minus 68 degrees. Just twelve degrees shy of the worst that Alaska can dish out.