Why does Minnesota sometimes get colder than the North Pole? | Hacker News Reader

Why does Minnesota sometimes get colder than the North Pole?

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93 pointssonabinu106 comments

Or come to North Dakota where in 1936 we recorded our highest (121°F in Steele on July 6) and lowest (-60°F in Parshall on February 15) temperatures.

I once had a grant that had data about the summer high and winter low effects on car maintenance of low income families. Its amazing what such a wide range of temps will do to the employment of rural low income families.

Last year's -35°F day before wind chill (which sent it down to truly horrific) was a pure pain in the butt.

https://www.weather.gov/bis/climate_EXT

How do we know that the employment is directly related to temperatures? What sort of relationship is it?

Negative, for sure. Cars don't start, accidents and illnesses are more common, carbon monoxide poisoning increases, heart attacks are more frequent with stress and snow shoveling. Throw in SAD and vitamin d deficiency - cold places throw a lot of shit at people.

My father used to cross country ski to work on the worst winter days. Sometimes he’d go on a drift right over stuck cars. Unexcused absences just weren’t a thing back then.

People wait for the major river separating Minnesota and Wisconsin to freeze up so they can drive across the frozen surface to their respective jobs and save 15 minutes on the commute via the bridges. It's a popular thing to do especially for Andersen Windows workers.

I feel that’s much less common now that the new bridge is in place; the old Stillwater bridge would often be broken or jammed up with traffic.

FWIW it's the Mississippi, but your description is probably more valuable given your point. (Though I think it's wild that people drive across the Mississippi, and I grew up just southeast of there in Rochester!)

Actually it sounds like he's referring to the St. Croix River. Andersen Windows is/was located in/near Stillwater.

Oh hey, I'd clean forgotten about that one! Thanks for pointing that out!

It mostly had to do with cars needing more maintenance, low income folks buying used cars, not having backup transportation (i.e. one car per family) when problems arise, and not having the funds to fix them.

Automobile use in the rust belt is so ridiculously wasteful, it no doubt generates heaps of jobs in the process.

I used to work as a mechanic in IL back in the day. It became normal for myself and my gearhead buddies to keep winter beaters and leave the nicer cars/motorcycles parked until the roads stopped getting salted and rain could wash it all away for summer. I'd go through winter beaters like they were shoes, whole used cars!

The amount of time and money I used to spend on automotive expenses back there is batshit crazy compared to what I spend in CA.

And the yearly rebuilding of all the roads trashed by the salt+plows. I wonder if it's less of an issue now with climate change.

>I wonder if it's less of an issue now with climate change

It's roughly as bad, some years are worse than others. Climate change hasn't made winter better.

If you live in California, climate change has made winters in the midwest _appear_ more mild.

How so? All I can figure is winter is supposed to be cold and snowy so California only hears about the extremes like a 60F day in January

Because Californians, being more liberal than average, are more likely to buy into the climate change narrative. Confirmation bias does the rest.

But anyone actually "buying into the climate change narrative" knows that the result isn't warmer winters.

By my teens it was already apparent that IL winters were becoming less snowy, but it was still a slushy+salty mess on the roads.

I still have contact with friends back home and the impression our convos leaves me with is that they're out riding mountain bikes in the winter months my childhood would have had me sledding in a snowsuit.

But maybe it's just irregular and there's lots of icy/slushy road days. I admit I don't pay attention to the weather forecasts back home, it's just passing conversations with old friends combined with what seemed like a trajectory towards increasingly mild winters before I left the state.

Illinois road construction tends to be optimized for repeat business and just barely avoiding the ire of local news.

That sounds like some impressive engineering.

1) Cars have had baked-on finish for 20+ years and generally don't rust through anymore, even with the ice melt put on roads in Minnesota;

2) Roads in Minnesota are not destroyed by salt + plows. Roads are destroyed by frost heave and by heavy trucks traveling on them as the ground freeze gradually melts in the spring. Locales in Minnesota have "road restrictions" in the spring to try to minimize the latter effect - that is, dump trucks/semis are limited to about 50% capacity per axle to try to minimize the damage done to the roads they drive over.

>Cars have had baked-on finish for 20+ years and generally don't rust through anymore, even with the ice melt put on roads in Minnesota;

It's better than it used to be but anything in the same plane as the tire rotates is still doesn't last. Rust also starts at the holes in panels where plastic trims attach and it's not uncommon to find 5-10yo vehicles that are missing large chunks of the rocker panels or areas around the rear perimeter under the bumper cover. Anything that routinely sees a gravel road will be destroyed in half the time.

> 1) Cars have had baked-on finish for 20+ years and generally don't rust through anymore, even with the ice melt put on roads in Minnesota;

If only the primary corrosion problem on automobiles were the painted unibody, which still is only a minor scratch or collision-repair away from devolving into the same rotting trash.

Especially with newer vehicles employing more aluminum parts, often fastened using steel fasteners if not to steel surfaces, you get plenty of galvanic corrosion at these critical junctions. The dissimilar metals exposed to saltwater electrolyte is basically a battery. And this is occurring out of sight unless you get under and wrench on your own vehicles, where there's substantially more exposure to the road salts.

It's hard to imagine how cold those temperatures are. When they predicted record cold in Chicago in 2019 I scoffed at weakling Americans and how my rugged British constitution would protect me. All the bravado evaporated quickly when I had to step outside for a hospital appointment that day. IT WAS COLD. REALLY COLD.

"In the Chicago area, temperatures plummeted as low as −23 °F (−31 °C) at O'Hare International Airport on January 30, with a windchill of −52 °F (−47 °C)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January%E2%80%93February_2019_...

I was in jail at the time and shortly after I met a guy in physical therapy who's fingers were all black. I asked him what happened. He said he had a dope (heroin) habit and went out that day trying to find a dealer. He was outside in that temperature for _8 hours_. Of course, he never found a dealer. He went home and took a hot shower and realized something was wrong. The day after I met him they sawed off all his fingers.

Now I must know how you came to travel from the UK to the US only to end up in jail. Did you fail to clap when the plane landed?

-This habit puzzles me no end; I'd be much more prone to expressing emotion in the case of the pilot NOT nailing the landing...

Yes, negative 23 Fahrenheit is very, very cold.

You could probably track extreme temps by how many new car batteries are bought. At those low of temps the batteri s freeze because they're not fully charged and/or their cars alternator is dying and only good enough to maintain maybe half a charge.

I'm in northeastern Ontario (usually see roughly -35 degC to 35 degC in a year).

I've been super impressed by the battery in my car. 7 years old and left to die from lack of use (second car plus pandemic). I've boosted it back to life probably half a dozen times now, and it keeps going.

We've all got bets going about when it leaves me stranded. There's no way it's very healthy, and there's no way my alternator hasn't been close to catching fire at some point.

But if I replace them now I'm going to be in the same position before long. Hardly seems like the time.

Wait, isn't 'before long' potentially 7 more years with a fresh battery? This kind of brinkmanship makes me nervous enough to price out capacitor jumpstarters.

Eh. I live in Florida, don't own a coat yet. I don't understand what "-60°F" means.

Most of the rest of the world has no idea what -60°F means either

It's -51.1̅°C, for anyone wondering.

>I once had a grant that had data about the summer high and winter low effects on car maintenance of low income families.

I'd bet a lot of money that it kneecaps them less than road salt combined with vehicle inspections.

You can afford a lot of batteries (and other stuff) when the state isn't trying to screw you over a rusty wheel arch.

I don't know, North Dakota really doesn't do vehicle inspections. Road salt is becoming less of an issue given the newer used cars and some changes by DOT.

Yearly fees (e.g. registration) are always a big issue for low income people. That is why I oppose a mileage tax on electric vehicles. Paying at the charger is much fairer for low income people and not a once a year, intrusive mileage fee.

I grew up in MN and I just wanted to say that it's generally not that bad, even though it sounds terrifying. All of the infrastructure is designed to handle it, houses are (mostly) designed to be insulated and heated properly, everyone owns appropriate winter clothes, has appropriate hobbies (cross country skiing, etc.) and the very cold snaps usually only last a few days to a week. It's also sunny when it gets this cold and almost never snows (the atmosphere is basically too cold to hold moisture), so you get a lot of high quality sunshine, clean air and manageable roads. Like many things in life, it's all a trade off, and I personally would take it over California smog most days of the year.

Some of the cities with the strongest shift in average temperatures due to climate change are actually in Minnesota, because one of the consequences is going to be less polar vortex events, which means the region sees less of these sudden rapid downward shifts in temperature. The difference in winters now (much milder) compared to when I grew up there are already meaningful and noticeable, which you can observe scientifically on the state's humorously named (but I think they recently changed it) Winter Misery Index https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/journal/winter_misery_in...

> has appropriate hobbies (cross country skiing, etc.)

I live in Madison, WI and honestly can't stand even being outside when it's below 40. Speak for yourself, just saying.

As for other cold areas in the contiguous united states. You have Peter Sinks, near Bear Lake, Utah. In which a sinkhole half of a mile in diameter has no outlet valley, is at 8,164 feet and in a dry climate.

Which has the second coldest temperature recorded in the lower 48 of -69.3F on Feb 1, 1985. [1]

https://climate.usu.edu/PeterSinks/index.php

Interesting - the Dolomites in Italy have similar sinkholes (doline) that also collect cold air: https://www.arpa.veneto.it/temi-ambientali/climatologia/prog...

It is actually fairly rare to see nested rings of contour lines on a map that do NOT increase in elevation, because sinks like this tend to get filled up with water.

I see that for most of the afternoon of December 9, the wind in the sink was considerably higher than at the rim, which I would not have thought would be likely at all.

I lived in MPLS for five years.

A -30 or -40 degree morning was a magical time.

Everything worked.

Everyone did exactly the thing they had to be doing. Everything was done correctly and diligently and on time.

You had your shit together or you stayed home. Or you were dead.

I miss it sometimes ...

I'm from the UK originally, and now live in Northern Europe where we regularly have -20C or more during winter.

It's crazy to me that if there is even a light dusting of snow, the UK comes to a halt. Where as here, it's just life as usual. You just get on with it and go about your day.

Coming from Minnesota and spending a few years in the SF Bay area it was funny to me how weather I didn't really even consider rain (maybe like heavy fog that was precipitating a little) would grind the highways to a stop.

Whatever the most extreme weather is in a location it tends to grind everything to a halt and generates a lot of exaggeration about how bad things are.

-40 is fun, especially throwing boiling water into the air and how it doesn't hit the ground.

I lived in a town in the Vermont mountains where it got to -40 (with very intense wind on top of that) occasionally and it felt qualitatively different than the positive single digit type cold that is more normal in Massachusetts.

It was almost easier to deal with because there aren't any options. If you don't have the right jacket, pants, boots, gloves, etc you just can't exist outside even for a few moments to brush off the car.

You can't be cold because if you're feeling the cold it's going to do damage.

The mountain air was probably much dryer.

The air near ice free water will feel much colder due to the increased humidity.

Oh that's a good thought! I figured that would be factored into the "feels like" number on the weather forecast though?

I moved from Indiana (Midwest US) to Norway. I'm near the cost, so it is kind of mild (comparative to inland), but there are vast differences.

In places with little to no snowfall, they simply don't have the infrastructure to deal with it, nor does the population have practice in driving and walking in the snow. That's the issue in the Southern US and the UK.

Where I lived in the states, it snowed every winter (almost?), but not usually so much at once. We had some infrastructure, but not enough to deal with very much snow at once - pretty much, things shut down if it got above the ankles. This was directly because there wasn't the infrastructure to deal with it.

And then, there is Norway, and the main roads are generally good enough. Folks use winter tires (all-season tires are just starting to get popular here: My neighbor doesn't trust them). Side roads generally aren't scraped down to the pavement, but rather get generally cleared and grit laid down for texture. I've seen videos of folks huddled behind a snowplow with Very deep snow: Where I lived in the US simply couldn't have done such a thing. Plus, the population is used to the amounts of snow they get, which means they aren't so concerned.

Infrastructure plus comfort levels go far.

You can always guess someone will comment exactly this.

Yeah the UK have problems with heavy snow. Yes, many countries do. Yes, Northern Europe are better at dealing with it but still have their own issues. Like hotter countries are better at dealing with the heat.

I won't claim to have run the numbers myself, but I assume it's done, and I can estimate that the loss of productivity from the at most few days a year simply doesn't justify the cost of being able to better cope with them.

Analogous on an individual level would be air conditioning. Sure, it can be uncomfortably hot for a few days in summer, sometimes, but most people don't think it's enough to justify AC.

-Being a Land Rover enthusiast (though for reliability, a Toyota Land Cruiser is the daily driver), I subscribe to a UK Land Rover magazine, being mailed to the rather sparsely populated community I call home on an island off the northwestern coast of Norway.

Now, a sure sign that winter is coming is that the editorials in LRM brims with expectation; soon the white mayhem will cause Britain to shut down, and Land Rover owners will again be called upon to brave the elements and go where no ordinary vehicle can go, shopping for the elderly and so on, as they are confined to their homes by a couple of inches of white powder on the ground. (Yes, I exaggerate a little for effect.)

I usually read this after having used the tractor to remove the night's 10-12 inches of snowfall from the driveway, so that my kids can ride their bikes to school.

A few years ago, I sent LRM a photo of my great aunt, living outside Kirkenes just a tad south of 70 degrees north (and, incidentally, east of Istanbul, but I digress).

She - in her early nineties - made short work of the snow and ice in her old Toyota Corolla.

It's all about what you are used to; just about any vehicle is quite capable in the wintertime if the driver adjusts properly to the conditions.

LRM didn't print my photo, though.

People die during heatwaves literally all the time.

The kind of cold that -40 is is easier to mitigate than heat but considerably more dangerous.

I’m not sure how that relates to my comment.

Living in Winnipeg, I've had my fair share of -40°C days.

I had some online friends living in California move up to Alaska for work and wanted advice on what to expect. He said experiencing 1-2°C in Oregon was brutal, he couldn't even imagine what -40°C was like.

They moved there and were shocked at how "tame" -40°C is. Perhaps it was bundling up and preparing for the weather but he said there was very noticeable difference with the humidity that made all the difference. It's almost like another scale.

Temperatures below freezing are not more painful than freezing temp. You just reach pain of freezing faster the further the temp below zero.

Breathing in -40C air is a lot different than breathing in 0C air.

Honestly, If it's -40C with no humidity and no wind it's really not that bad. You learn to breath differently, slower, through your mouth in an elongated shape so that the air can preheat before it hits your lungs.

That was my experience. When you had severe cold snaps and it was below -35C, usually it was dead calm and no wind.

Felt warmer than -20C with a wind.

Also there can’t really be any humidity at those temps.

Ya or when your body just starts vibrating after 5 mins and your eyelashes freeze when you blink and your lips stick when you close your mouth. -40C is very different on the body then 0C

I've lived in SK and AB my entire 40+ years. The coldest I can ever remember experiencing is being in Paris on valentine's day in the early 2000's. It was just below 0c but the humidity made almost unbearable.

When it’s -40°. it doesn't matter whether it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius.

When it's -40° Kelvin, it does.

(Well, "intellectual curiosity" wise... "Cognize -40°K. On a tesseract")

° shouldn't be used with Kelvin scale.

You are right, I forgot. In the sixties the "Kelvin" became a Unit of Measure. But it's a convention - it remains a "degree", somehow, though the concept is weak: it indicates discreets, values are continuous. Degrees make more sense when "24.4" does not, while measurements are intended to be ideally precise.

Kelvin doesn't have negative values. 0K is absolute zero.

Yes I know. I afforded a rare joke. In fact, I stated that one can now attempt the intellectual exercise of visualizing -40 Kelvin: there, the interest - theoretical, and supposedly very practical and urgent - is raised which was lost in the poster's stated irrelevance of -40°C vs -40°F.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

I had the same experience when I visited harbin. I knew t was -40C, the ice sculptures clued me in that it was cold, but indoor heating plus dressing appropriately meant I could barely tell. Well, except my digital camera battery lost its charge super quickly (this was back in 2005 or so).

The coldest winter I experienced was in southern China, it was 5C but the humidity, and more importantly, lack of central indoor heating everywhere wore you down very quickly.

Exactly this. I've lived in a part of central America where winter temperatures can drop to between 3 and 6 degrees Celsius but no lower. By the standards of the northern cold I grew up with, it seems like nothing, but in the north, every place, home, public transport and etc had interior heating working at all times during winter, meaning that you'd never notice cold unless you deliberately went outside. The place in central America on the other hand, no indoor heating to speak of, high humidity, and winter misery all around, especially if you're sitting still in your home (as people tend to do).

The northern part of MN and the NE half of NoDak are both north of the Laurentian Divide. Water flows north 'above' it. (The 'Divide' splits 3 watersheds at once near Hibbing, MN.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NorthAmerica-WaterDivides...]

The land between the Arctic and the Divide is still quite flat as a result of the last glaciation (it filled up with meltwater for a few thousand years). There isn't much topography to slow the cold air down. Cities north of that green-line have historically been the coldest.

Interesting. Nevertheless ... think of everywhere in the USA that you think is cold (outside of Alaska) ... almost all of Canada is colder than that (Vancouver and coastal BC being the primary exception).

fun fact for the day: some of california is at a higher latitude than some of canada.

... but generally has an ocean-influenced climate (at least west of the Sierras) rather than a continental climate as found across Canada.

Also kind of fun: Detroit is due north of Canada

Or as some put it: Canada is a southern suburb of Detroit.

Where?

NE corner of California: 41.994612, -120.001006

Middle Island, in Lake Erie: 41.682534, -82.683679

(I was curious myself, so I went digging in Apple Maps.)

(Update: realized my NE corner coordinates were in fact a little inside the border, so grabbed ones even farther north.)

Ah no way. Looks like Nevada and Utah do too. Seems like that’s only 20 miles north

While definitely true by land area, it's worth noting that the densely populated Ontario Peninsula is probably another exception. Minneapolis is considerably colder in winter than Toronto: https://weatherspark.com/compare/m/1/19863~10405/Comparison-...

It’s also further north than Toronto

Many times this is actually not true and because Canada is North of the US many people think this. Much of Canada even in the prairie provinces stays much warmer than Minnesota. Minnesota is about as far away from an ocean that you can get and when you get a polar vortex that comes straight down from the Hudson Bay it will usually cause temps in Minnesota to be colder than even across the border to the North in Canada. Looking at temps right now it is warmer North of the Hudson Bay than it is in Northern Minnesota.

This. It is just plain nicer most of the time. It is usually sunny, and in Alberta we get frequent Chinook winds; there is no long deep freeze to endure.

The majority of Canadian cities have the latitudes of the Russian South, and many Russians migrate to the south for the "warm climate". Cold is such a relative concept

Latitude alone doesn't determine how cold winters get.

Average low °C Dec-Feb:

Moscow −6.5, −8.7, −8.8

Ottawa −9.2, −14.4, −12.5

Yet Moscow is over 1000km farther north.

Europe gets warm moist weather blowing in from the Atlantic. Warm Pacific weather gets blocked by the rockies in North America.

Moscow isn't considered a cold city in Russia, I live in a city just 600 km to the east from it, same latitude, and the average low is -13C Feb-Dec here. Sure not everything is determined by latitude alone, there's a nice video which compares the climates of USA/Canada/Russia: https://youtu.be/0ucZBvmmml4

The video is neat, but averaging over the year is deceptive. A hot August doesn't make Ottawa's cold January more pleasant.

My point was just that people move to the Russian South for mild winters, and it does have mild winters by Canadian standards.

> (outside of Alaska)

Ketchikan is not very cold at all. It is 2C right now, very coastal BC-like temperature on the panhandle. On average, people in North Dakota and Minnesota are probably colder than people in Alaska (Fargo at -7c vs Anchorage at -6c). For top ten coldest American cities, only Fairbanks makes the list, the rest are in Minnesota or the Dakotas: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/coldest-c...

Yeah, but I've heard Fairbanks can get nasty ice fog. Even we don't get that here in Minnesota.

Fairbanks only has 30k people, most of Alaska lives in anchorage or the panhandle.

Much of Siberia is similarly far from the ocean and has pretty similar weather, as my Siberian friend tells me.

Yakutsk, specifically.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/527142/what-its-live-yak...

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1KVw7rwaymY

I am from Chennai, India where < 18 deg C is once a few days in a year event. I spent 3 months in MSP working with one of the large retailers. Their offices were in a set of buildings and as a contractor had to park the car in the parking lot and take the shuttle into the office. It was miserably cold and you come back to frozen keylocks or worse batteries. But the entire town just worked during the cold weather. Amazing!

Average temps in the northern half of VT and NH are just as cold as Duluth. Parts of Maine are probably colder.

Duluth is on Lake Superior and relatively warm.

Depends on where in Duluth you mean. It’s significantly colder than Minneapolis, especially if you mean downtown which is at the bottom of a huge hill next to the lake. I was seeing regular temps in the 40s in May when it was upper 70s here in Minneapolis.

The lake has opposite effects in summer and winter.

Yes, I lived in Milwaukee for most of my life and we saw the same things there from Lake Michigan. But you're saying Duluth is "relatively warm" but compared to what?

Normal heating degree days:

  Duluth: 9,444
  Twin Cities: 7,581
  Portland, ME: 7,106

Duluth isn't particularly warm.

Relative to the colder places in Minnesota is what I meant. But I guess there's not a lot of actual towns that are much colder.

Ahh I see. You're right though, there are colder towns, like International Falls.

Keep in mind Portland, ME is coastal and fairly warm for Maine. I’d have to think it’s significantly colder up in Caribou or Fort Kent.

There's even a joke about that.

Q: When is summer in Minnesota?

A: Last year, I think, it was on a Thursday.

More interested in listening the related story: "Was organized crime behind the demise of Twin Cities streetcars?" Featuring a picture of the ceremonial burning of the last streetcar, after a tour with local politicians. (Haven't listened yet, but I know what happened. GM did nothing wrong.)

I somehow expected something surprising in the article but there really wasn’t (the average temperature is in fact significantly lower in North Pole). The headline is at least not clickbait.

Continentality!

Can someone who can get through the paywall summarize the clickbait antidote?

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