An all-time record spring blizzard earlier this past week dumped up to 20 inches of snow on parts of northeastern North Dakota, extreme northwestern Minnesota and southern Manitoba.
Grafton, North Dakota, to the north of Grand Forks, had the most snow with a whopping 20.3 inches. Grand Forks had 11.5 inches breaking a snowfall record that had stood for more than a century. The city likewise observed -5 degrees on April 2, the 96th morning with readings of zero or below during the six months since the record October 5 blizzard that killed 72,000 cattle in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The previous record for subzero days in Grand Forks was 73 days in the brutal winter of 1978-79, when many climatologists were predicting the advent of a new ‘Little Ice Age.’ (It didn’t happen as we know.)
Since last October, as of this Thursday, April 3, there had been an all-time record 23 Arctic invasions during this coldest winter season in modern times in the North Country. The previous record was 13 Arctic fronts in 1978-79.
We should likewise remember that the ice coverage this past winter in early March on the Great Lakes to the east of North Dakota and Minnesota reached a near record 92.2%, exceeded only by the previously mentioned bitterly cold winter of 1978-79 when the icepack reached 94.7% on Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Ontario and Erie. Lake Champlain, often called “the sixth Great Lake,” which is located on the border of Vermont and New York State where we used to live, froze solid this year for the first time this new century.
This winter of 2013-14 was also the coldest in living memory in parts of Manitoba to the north of North Dakota and Minnesota.
Manitoba’s capital city of Winnipeg, or “WINTERPEG,” as the locals call it, saw a record mean temperature between December 1, 2013 and February 28, 2014 of -20.3 degrees Celsius (-5 degrees Fahrenheit).
As of early April, the ground is still solidly frozen “to depths nobody can remember.” Record subzero temperatures also occurred like in Grand Forks in Winnipeg on Wednesday, April 2.
Farmers are worried that plantings of spring crops will probably be delayed for several weeks until the frost finally gets out of the ground near the US/Canada border. Approximately 3 to 4 million acres may not be planted in 2014 due to the unprecedented cold. (Where is that dumb global warming? Remember, just last year, South America had its coldest and snowiest winter in a century. For the first time in at least 400 years, the Pyramids in Egypt were blanketed by snow this January.)
I should also point out that the global warming climate-change ship during the middle of the Antarctic summer season, our winter, was caught stuck in ice 8 to 12 feet thick, the most summer ice since at least 1979 when polar ice records began.
One last item to address, will North Dakota, Minnesota and southern Manitoba, face disastrous flooding like in recent years when the heavy snows finally melt atop the frozen ground?
Well, the trusted National Weather Service says that the snows of the winter of 2013-14 near the US/Canada border have been “dry without a lot of water,” pointing to not much of a flood threat later this spring. But, I say that, if it turns warm and wet during the next 4 to 6 weeks in the North Country, there will be at least some localized lowland flooding.
