Polar Vortex and Extreamly Cold Temperatures

A wave of cold, artic air moved into the United States late in January 2019. Many record cold temperatures were broken. You can search on the news for that.

3-years of HRRR model analyses were used to compute empirical cumulative distributions of conditions for every hour of the year (Blaylock et al. 2018). This image show how much the temperatures at 0700 UTC on 31 January 2019 are less than the 5th percentile for the same time of year. This shows that temperatures are much more than 10 degrees colder than the 5th percentile temperature.

Cold Morning

Snapshot of temperatures (F) around the Great Salt Lake at 8:30 AM local time.

(The overnight temperature at some of these sites was colder)

24 Hour Low Temperatures:

Source: preview.weather.gov/edd

Cold Morning

Warm and cold night

Temperatures got warmer throughout the night in Spanish Fork

 

Now, moving north to the Point of the Mountain...

And finally the Airport. They were stuck in a cold pool all night, then southerly winds mixed out the cold air and temperatures rose quickly to over 54 C

Inversion this morning quite impressive from the morning rawinsonde:

 Check out the time series of Sodar data near the airport as the cold pool mixed out:

Peter Sinks, Utah: One of the coldest places

The Peter Sinks in Northern Utah (near Bear Lake) is one of the coldest places in the lower 48 states.
Some info here: https://climate.usurf.usu.edu/PeterSinks/
and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sinks

From MesoWest: the PSINK and PSRIM sites at midnight on December 8, 2016

The temperature gradient between the rim and the valley, a 270 foot vertical difference, can be quite large. Over the last two days temperatures have plunged below -40 C.

Max, min, and mean temperatures for the two stations are shown below (need to apply some quality control on the data from the MesoWest API seeing that there is a max temperature in September of over a 105 F, which seems odd) Still, it is often quite cold in the Peter Sinks.