Comparing Cold and Colder Springs in Fairbanks

Long time Fairbanksians have been comparing this spring to 1992. That spring was much snowier than this year, but this year is colder. So I thought it would be interesting to compare temperatures this spring, not to the average, but to the coldest springs. So of course I have to make a chart, and here it is:

The heavy black line is this year (through Wednesday, May 15th), and the lighter lines are some representative prior years. The dotted line is the average of eight cold April-May periods (1924, 1931, 1945, 1948, 1964, 1985, 1992 and 2002) not including this year (which is certain to be in the top three). So in the "typical" cold spring, the average daily temperature does not get above freezing to stay until about May 4th. Well, we missed that this year by nearly a week. In the typical cold the daily mean exceeds 40ºF about May 10th. While we have had a few days that warm, with the coldest airmass so late in the spring poised for the weekend (more on that in a coming post), we are not going to keep daily means above 40ºF until early next week, nearly two weeks later than normal even for a "cold spring".