The National Weather Service is kind of the anti\u2013Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It\u2019s collected billions of records (I\u2019ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.<\/p>\n
Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. \u201cThere\u2019s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,\u201d Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the\u00a0Daily Herald. \u201cIt\u2019s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,\u201d the office added in an official statement.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the \u201cicebox of the nation,\u201d broke its old temperature records\u2014by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century\u2019s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That\u2019s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web\u2019s go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote, \u201cThis is not the atmosphere I grew up with,\u201d a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more\u2026 weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday\u2019s low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged \u201cthis is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.\u201d<\/p>\n