Wrong Way Temperatures

It’s another one of “those” days where the temperature is actually going the wrong direction – down instead of up – or holding steady. Here’s a graph of the temperatures for the last 24 hours from my weather station. At the Birmingham Shuttlesworth International Airport, the high for the day so far occurred at 12:01 am when the temperature was 63 degrees. Since then the temperature has fallen to a current reading of 57 degrees where it has been hold steady. The reason for the temperatures to hold steady or go down is the passage of a cold front which is ushering in cold air. We could conceivably go up a few degrees since we will see the sun this afternoon, but I don’t expect temperatures to climb much since the warming of the sun will be offset by the cold air advection.

Being curious since we’ve seen this happen a number of times in 2015, I decided to check the weather observations for all of 2015 at the Birmingham airport to see how many times our daily high was lower than 50 degrees, using that as my idea of a cold day. I figured this would be a good bellwether as to how cold it has been so far this year. According to the data from the National Weather Service, the high has been below 50 degrees 13 times in 2015 including four days in which the high temperature for the day did not get out of the 30s. Brrr!!! January 23rd was an interesting day because the high was 49 and the low was 40, so we didn’t get out of the forties all day!

My interest in how cold it has been was piqued when I checked the GFS MOS values for Birmingham this morning. GFS stands for Global Forecast System which is the premiere US weather forecasting model, and MOS stands for Model Output Statistics which is a bunch of numbers showing anticipated highs and lows among other things. The GFS MOS this morning showed a 13 degree low for Birmingham on Sunday morning, February 15th. That seemed pretty cold so I checked and found out the record low for February 15 in Birmingham is 15. If the GFS MOS forecast verifies, we’ll set a new record low.

-Brian-

Category: Alabama's Weather