March Record Cold

Rick Thoman has a nice blog post about the remarkable cold for many locations in March:

https://alaskaclimate.substack.com/p/record-setting-cold-march-in-alaska

With Fairbanks being near the epicenter of the cold anomaly, it's worth drawing attention to some of the remarkable highlights there.  The monthly mean temperature of -9.0°F at the airport was 19.6°F below normal, the most anomalously cold month since February 1990.  It was the coldest March on record, approximately equal to an average January in terms of mean temperature.

Rick Thoman makes the interesting point that there is actually a statistically significant trend towards greater variability in March mean temperatures from year-to-year:

Overnight minimum temperatures (mean of -26.3°F) were even more unusual at 22.9°F below normal and 5.4°F below the previous record.  Remarkably, there are not that many calendar months with such low minimum temperatures at any time during winter: only 4 months this century prior to this winter.  There are also only a couple of months in Fairbanks history with mean maximum or minimum temperatures so far outside the historical range: the extreme warmth of January 1981, and the extreme cold of September 1992.  Here's a chart of March average daily minimum temperature:

Daily maximum temperatures were not quite as extreme in terms of their monthly mean, but the overall monthly maximum of only 30°F was a record; Fairbanks has not previously been observed to stay below freezing the entire month.

The last time the temperature was above freezing at the Fairbanks airport was October 31, and that means the entire climatological "cold season" of November through March was at or below freezing (32°F was reached on January 16).  Again that is a first in Fairbanks.

Here's an interesting (to me) perspective on when the monthly mean temperature records were set in Fairbanks.  Summer and winter cold records mostly occurred around 1950-1980, but record-setting cold has occurred more recently in autumn (1990s) and March-April (2013 and this year).  Warm records clustered in 1975-1981.

Only March, April, and October have their cold records occurring after their warm records.  The February records occurred in back-to-back years in 1979 and 1980.

I'll be on the road for the next week or so, but more discussion of the March extremes will be forthcoming when all the usual climate data is available.