Peter Sink Utah dropped to -35°F Monday morning setting the all time low for the lower 48 in October. Yesterday they dropped to -41.3°F beating that record and per the USA Today the low was -45°F this morning. I have not been able to find the official numbers for today but I will be able to after midnight. Peter Sink is a favorable cold air drainage area and is typically one of the colder spots in the US. But this is extreme for that area this early. The Grand Canyon Airport in Arizona dropped to -3°F this morning. Extremely dry air allowing for cold morning lows and helping to fuel the fires in California.
Thanks Grant. That's incredible.
I went to that link, just to have one with the story about this record cold.
Low and behold, they also have a video that tells us that climate change causes colder Winters and more snow.
Of course it does.........whatever the extreme bad weather is..........it had to be from climate change........ applying the new principle of climate science..............."climate change causes everything"
Of course global warming causes colder Winters and more snow. Shouldn't everybody know that by now? And if we have global cooling, Winters will warm up and snow will become scarce...................right.
It’s always might or could. Always. Never an explanation of how what they are saying will happen. I hate when weather turns political. We had a story tonight that said sea levels might rise by 7 feet by 2100. Im over it. Anyone who wants to get ride of their beach front property I’ll take it off your hands.
Breaking a monthly temperature record by 10 deg. F has got to be unprecedented, don't you think?
Yes. Peter sink is a perfect cold air drainage but even there it seems incredible.
This is just extreme weather.......similar to past extreme weather.....similar to future extreme weather.
No evidence of cooling or warming or not warming or climate change or a climate crisis.
Extreme weather is expected, sometimes really extreme. Which is when grant and I have the most fun doing the most fun job on the planet.
Not fun because it hurts people. We try to save lives and help prepare people to act ahead of extreme events.
Fun because we appreciate the physics and power..........and especially the beauty of the atmosphere and the incredible ways that this is reflected in the real world......that we can see and measure and contemplate/reflect on!
The best and most challenging part is analyzing and tracking and forecasting it using our crystal balls. Using Weather models is like peering into the future. Seeing things that will happen.....before they happen.
And every day it changes.
As Grant was stating, Peter Sinks is a very unique place because of the cold air drainage that takes places(colder air is more dense and "sinks")
https://climate.usu.edu/PeterSinks/index.php
"On Feb. 1, 1985, the temperature at Peter Sinks location plummeted to -69.3°F, the second coldest ever recorded in the lower 48 states. The lowest was -69.7°F at Roger's Pass, Montana in January 1954. Moreover, Peter Sinks and nearby Middle Sink have the distinction of having all but one of the monthly low temperature records for Utah.
So why is this montane site, located 20 miles northeast of Logan, so cold? The low temperatures are due to a combination of the area’s unique basin topography, high elevation, and dry climate. Peter Sinks, at an elevation of 8,164 feet, is a natural limestone sinkhole approximately one-half mile in diameter; one can liken it to a large bowl, which has no valley outlet to drain water or air. On calm cloudless nights this high basin loses accumulated daytime heat to the atmosphere. In addition, cool dense air slides down-slope into the basin floor in a process known as cold air pooling. Extremely low temperatures can occur, especially in the wake of wintertime arctic fronts."
metmike: Look what can happen during the night at this location........in red vs the temperature of the surrounding area as cold pools into the cold air sink hole. Note that winds are calm. If there is much wind, it creates mixing of the air mass and doesn't allow the colder, more dense air to "separate" and drop lower because of gravity.
Here's an interesting study for scientific minds on the topic:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/met.1317
This effect is actually widespread across the country but just not as amplified as we have in the above examples.
Farmers can tell you how, on clear, calm nights and temperatures dropping into the 30's, how the low spots were frosted and the high spots stayed above freezing and the NWS in town 5 miles away had a low temperature of 40!
Here's an article that Grant will especially like:
Ever since I’ve been working in Charlotte there has been a running joke among my fellow meteorologists about the “official” temperature readings taken out at the airport. For years I’ve noticed there is a sharp dip in temperatures in-between hours in the morning. We’d be at 30° at 6am and 29° at 7am but some how in the hour in-between the low would come in at 25°.
Now this can be somewhat explained by evaporative cooling of the dew on the grass surface right after the sun comes up, but this is a little extreme.
The other oddity is that on nights when we have clear skies, calm winds and dry air in place for ideal radiational cooling. We get odd jumps in temperatures between 9-11pm. Last night was a perfect example of 
this. You can see to the right that the temperature was falling steadily from sunset which was at 5:12pm(17:12). Then we started cooling down fast as we dropped from 43° at 8pm down to 35° at 9pm. Then for some odd reason the temperature jumped back up 6° to 41° at 10pm, then it kept rising to 43° at 11pm. Then at midnight back down to 35°.
So what gives? Well I have a few ideas and the first one has an impact on the morning lows directly and contributes to the evening jumps. The ASOS(Automated Surface Observing System) as we call them is sited in a low spot between a runway and a wooded area. In fact it lies in a lowering that also serves as drainage for water on the airport grounds. The problem with this is cold air at night drains just like water to the lowest spot it can find. Due to cold air being denser than warmer air. Below is an illustration of this cold air drainage.
Now take at look at the location of Charlotte-Douglas’s thermometer. Below are 2 views of the ASOS site notice the low spot it sits in. Then in the USGS terrain map you actually see the water drainage areas marked by the blue arrows.
ainage and this may explain the morning lows dropping around sunrise so much. The coldest of air would just be settling in right after sunset into the morning when we have the ideal radiational cooling set-up. I should also note that Charlotte(CLT) was one of the few locations to actually have their 1980-2010 climate averages go down (see previous wxbrad post). I think this cold air drainage might have contributed to that for sure.
Since I have established we have a cold air drainage location what could causes a sudden rise in temperatures in the evenings? Well here’s a great example of a cold air drainage temperature profile, slight exaggeration but it makes the point.
So what would happened if you mixed some of the warmer air from the higher spots down into the lower spots? Likely a temperature rise would occur. We’ll at the airport in the evenings we have lots of planes taking off and landing very close by. Notice that big runway to the right. Think maybe a huge U.S. Airways Airbus taking off on a night when we have cold air drainage might mix things up a bit? 
If one runway doesn’t convince you how about an airport expansion with a new taxiway on the south side of the ASOS? Check out the changes.
Lots of wooded areas to the West and Southwest.
Now look West and Southwest.
Notice not only are all the trees cut down between the airport and 485 but there is a new taxiway just to the south of the ASOS. So now there are planes traveling on 2 sides of the ASOS instrumentation. There’s no doubt that these changes to the airport and the increased airport traffic are causing the inversion on cold nights to temporarily break down. Causing a warm up in the evenings when many flights are taking off or landing. I also think that any light south breeze which is now coming from a concrete taxiway to the south could also cause these brief warms ups. Remember this from last night notice the wind direction change when the temperature went up. West and Southwest light wind which is blowing right from the new taxiway and the airport expansion area.
That was very interesting. Planes breaking up the inversion allowing the low levels to mix again.