The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a
just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day.
It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where
early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are
stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms,
blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the
NWS are pretty slim.
Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing
bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather,
but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago
NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald.
“It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100 year long
periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office
added in an official statement.
It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation
simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox
of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two
degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin
ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South
Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s
in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters,
founder of WeatherUnderground, the web’s go-to site for meteorological
information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home
and wrote, “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with,” a fact confirmed
later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength
tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more… weathermanish.
Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday’s
low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged “this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.”
