ST. LOUIS — St. Louis was blasted with arctic air in mid-January and had to face the cold until the end of the month.
Schools struggled to keep kids warm while firetrucks struggled to stay on the road after a layer of ice blanketed the area.
It's not unusual for cold weather to hit the Midwest in the midst of winter, but the sub-zero chills left many wondering whether the long stretch of low temperatures was out of the ordinary.
The VERIFY team dipped into historic weather data to find out whether last month was really colder than normal.
The question
Were last January's temperatures colder than normal in St. Louis?
Our sources
- Jon Carney, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in St. Louis
- Daily National Weather Service Climatological Reports
The answer
Yes, January's average temperature in St. Louis was colder than usual, but just barely.
What we found
Meteorologists use two measures to compare temperatures throughout history: averages and "normals."
Average temperatures are the same averages people are taught in school, taking all of the high and low temperatures for a given date and dividing by the number of years used.
Normal temperatures are calculated by averaging high and low temperatures over a 30-year period. Whenever meteorologists say a temperature is warmer or colder than normal, they are referencing this 30-year average. Meteorologists use this in order to provide a baseline to compare a location's current weather to what it has seen throughout history.
The current "normal" range meteorologists use is between 1991 and 2020.
Of the 31 days in January, St. Louis had 23 days in January when temperatures were warmer than normal. Then, the polar vortex hit, resulting in eight days with temperatures colder than their historical normals.
Carney said those colder-than-normal days actually saved St. Louis from having a warmer January than normal.
"Right there in the middle of the month when we had that cold snap, on the 14th, we were 34 degrees below normal. So, yeah, It feels awfully cold on those days, obviously, but because there were so many more days that were above normal, the month kind of averages out," Carney said.
In the end, January's average temperature ended up at 31.9 degrees in 2024, which was only .2 degrees below the normal temperature St. Louis usually experiences during the month.
We can VERIFY: Yes, the St. Louis area's average temperature during January 2024 was colder than normal, but only by .2 degrees.
VERIFY
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