[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
Considering how relentlessly I’ve been tweeting about this week’s blast of frigid cold in Denver (a.k.a. #coldfrontmageddon and/or #arcticairpocalypse), I figured a quick Tumblr post was in order.
When I woke up this morning, here’s what my iPhone said the temperature was in our neighborhood:
Denver’s official low temperature was -15º this morning, tying the record for the date, and making today the coldest day in Denver since February 2, 2011 – an occasion I remember well, because it happened to be the date of my long-planned Excellent Basketball Adventure, which had me driving north to the even-more-frigid climes of Laramie, WY and Fort Collins, CO, and encountering scenes like this:
The low that morning in Denver was -17º. But these double-digits-below-zero numbers are a little deceiving, because Denver’s official temperature is measured at Denver International Airport, which is politically part of Denver, but geographically on the edge of Colorado’s eastern plains – which means it invariably gets colder on a frigid night than the rest of the city, where people actually live. (DIA is also at greater risk for tornadoes. Hence all those prominent “tornado shelter” signs outside the airport bathrooms. But I digress.)
In downtown Denver, this morning’s overnight low was measured at a balmy -0.9º, presumably thanks in part to the urban heat island. (“Heat”…ha!) In Stapleton – away from the downtown micro-climate, and also just a smidge closer to DIA and the plains – the mercury dipped to around -6.1º (Central Park North) or -6.7º (Eastbridge). And don’t even get me started on the -11º dew point, which led to #chappedlipocalypse.
Here are some photos I snapped this morning:
Steam rising from Stapleton homes at 7:20 AM (temperature -4.7º).
The view looking east from my office window at 8:55 AM, showing steam rising from buildings in Downtown Denver, North Capitol Hill and City Park West. (The temperature was +4º downtown, and probably several degrees cooler in the other neighborhoods.)
The view looking north (from the corner office down the hall), at 9:09 AM, of steam rising from Commerce City factories and power plants, getting flattened out due to a warmer inversion layer, and then forming a steam tower cumulus cloud.
Okay, so it’s cold. Really cold. Dangerously cold. But let’s put this Denver cold snap into some sort of personal historical context – a task made easier thanks to the awesomeness of Weather Underground’s network of Personal Weather Stations and their easily-accessible archives of detailed weather data.
Both of above-cited PWS’s in Stapleton only started operating fairly recently, but a pair of very nearby stations in Park Hill and Mayfair go back much further. They both measured a low temp of -4.6° this morning, and according to their respective archives, that makes today the fifth-coldest day since we moved to Stapleton (in April 2009), as measured by the day’s low temperature. The only colder days were a memorably frigid trio during the February 2011 cold snap (the high temperature in Park Hill on 2/1/11 was only 1º; at DIA, it was -1º), and a cold day in December 2009. Here’s the list:
1. February 2, 2011 (-12º at both Park Hill and Mayfair)
2. February 1, 2011 (-10º at Park Hill, -9º at Mayfair)
3. February 9, 2011 (-7º at Park Hill, -5º at Mayfair)
4. December 9, 2009 (-5.3º at both Park Hill and Mayfair)
5. December 5, 2013 (-4.6º at both Park Hill and Mayfair)
That means today is the coldest day ever in the life of our youngest daughter, 2 ½-year-old “Loyabelle,” who was born in July 2011.
Brrrrrr.
U.S. temperature map (by @intellicast) at 5am MST, when @StapletonDenver hit its -6° low. #cowx #arcticairpocalypse pic.twitter.com/kB7a3EPBYk
— Brendan Loy (@brendanloy)