Posted on 01/17/2005 11:01:41 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Temperatures plummeted across the eastern half of the nation Monday, approaching an all-time record in northern Minnesota and freezing the Gulf Coast as a river of Arctic air pushed southward.
Thermometers registered a low of 54 degrees below zero at Embarrass, Minn.
"You keep living, but it gets old after a while," said Christine Mackai, the town clerk for the community of about 1,400 people in northeast Minnesota.
Minnesota's record is 60 below, set on Feb. 2, 1996, in Tower, about 10 miles north of Embarrass.
The cold at Embarrass didn't stop the regular customers from getting their morning coffee at Four Corners, a cafe and gas station.
"Everybody left their cars running," waitress Trish Roggenbuck said. "It was pretty much breathtaking when you walked outside."
While below-zero readings stayed in the upper Midwest, thermometers dropped below the freezing mark all the way to the Gulf of Mexico coast.
The morning low was 28, with wind chills in the upper teens, at Mobile, Ala., Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss., and Pensacola, Fla. A hard freeze warning was in effect overnight into Tuesday morning for parts of Mississippi, the weather service said.
Mackai said Embarrass had been prepared for bitter cold as early as last Thursday. "It only got down to 28 below, and that's nothing. That's no big deal," she said.
Elsewhere in northern Minnesota on Monday, Babbitt chilled to 51 below, and International Falls — which calls itself the Nation's Icebox — dropped to 44 below, the national Weather Service said. Farther south, Minneapolis-St. Paul bottomed out at a mere 11 below.
The arctic blast followed several days of subzero temperatures. Weather service meteorologist Greg Frosig in Duluth said Monday's high would still be below zero in northern Minnesota.
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On the Net:
National Weather Service (news - web sites): http://weather.noaa.gov/
Current Temperatures-Ohio State University: http://www.weatherimages.org/data/imag226.html
If your beer gets warm you're not drinking fast enough. That bit of advice works in Phoenix when it's 115 degrees. I guess when it's below -40 degrees you need to drink it fast before it freezes.
Bad day to be on the Rail Road...when I worked for the old Soo Line in Superior...the pull aparts and derailments were bad this time of year...getting called out for in the middle of the night even worse...
Hundred below wind chills do bad things to machines as well as animals and men.....
How it can shrink rail is truly amazing...
Would that be those down jackets that made people look like human hand grenades?
Northwest Airlines outlawed them because they took up too much room on their 700 passenger DC-9's.
Feels Like: 78°F
Oh, the humanity!!
I was born and raised in Superior.
Northwest Airlines. The only airline that has seats leaning forward.
Now THAT'S some series cold (and impossible prior to "global warming :-)
So...it was you humping those empties into Murphy Oil, then ?
Figure it would freeze a ring or two around a polar bears ass
I'm the "2" (above zero) in your map...I work at that airport. Anyway our low this morning was -18.
shhh you might inadvertantly cause brain freeze with that question
Not commenting on the validity of global warming (I suppose since scientific community is divided on this issue I'll have to say I just don't know), but the only thing that matters is the average temperature, not records one way or another.
not quite -40 is the same for f and c, but at that point whos counting anymore
Damn that's cold. I didn't even know Kelvin had a negative scale, that would make it roughly -490F wouldn't it?
Or are we into a whole new scale at that point.
has there ever been anything recorded below absolute zero, I thought the closest they have come to recording a temperature near absolute zero was at mit with a sodium gas at one-half billionth a degree from absolute zero or something like that.
I think he was joking, but negative temperatures on Kelvin scale actually do exist. However such temperatures can not be achieved by traditional means (ie. "cooling). I'm not good at explaining this stuff, so here's a related article I googled http://www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/art/esa/negkelvin/negkelvin.html
Below absolute zero was the science geeks lackey...
considering that absolute zero in farhenheit is -459 degrees I am guessing it is something like -530 degrees farhenheit, without a calculator handy could be more could be less.
its off the edge of my slide rule.
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