Check out the forecast for Fairbanks, AK!

http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/USAK0083?from=36hr_fcst10DayLink_undeclared

Particular this Wednesday with a predicted low of -52 degrees F. Growing up in northern VT, I recall -38 F but that is about the lowest. It has been so warm this Jan in New England and indeed pretty much the whole US but it looks like places like Fairbanks and others have suffered.

What is the coldest you have experienced?

The coldest I've personally been out in is -2°F in 1994 IIRC. In NYC days under 10°F are relatively rarely, and under 0°F is at best a few times in a decade occurance.

As for the coldest temperatures I've actually experienced, meaning felt in some manner, I've put my head in my thermoelectric temperature chamber when it was under -40°F but of course the door being opened warmed things up pretty quickly. I also had my hand on the cooling plate used in this chamber when I was testing it. A few times I managed to get down to under -90°F, once I hit -108°F. Again, the plate warmed rather quickly in response to being touched by warm fingers, but it could hold under -70°F continuously for as long as I dared to keep my hand on it, which obviously wasn't very long. Extreme cold has always fascinated me.

yikes! That's cold. I came close to dieing twice in my life and once was near a town in Northern British Columbia called Tumbler Ridge. This was about twenty years ago and five of us were traveling salesmen. It was -50c and amazingly cold. I made the mistake of grabing my clipboard within less than a minute of getting out of the car and feeling the hotest burning, I just threw the clipboard in the air and put my gloves on.

We were traveling from TR to DC at night with a full tank of gas and the car ran out about half way. The town is a mere 125 km southwest of Mile Zero (Dawson Creek) of the Alaska Highway. That's about 77 miles. We were in the middle of NOWHERE and FAR FROM NOWHERE and it was dark and we had no flashlights.

I got out of the car with one of the guys and we walked down the dark desolate road hoping for the best but thinking the worst. About a mile down the road we came across a farm and a lot of mean sounding dogs. We musturd up the courage, hopped the fence and walked up to the house deep into the property. They guy was surprise to see us and he wasn't all that sociable but he gave us a bunch of purple gas (Govt suplement gas) for us to make it to DC.

We made it back to the car where we found our buddy huddled up with the two girls in the back seat trying to stay warm. We were freezing and the guy with me got frostbite on his feet. I was luckily well dressed and could have lasted another hour tops.

We drove back to DC and ran out of gas on the same street as the motel. What an adventure.

By the way, -50c is -58f

I've been in Fairbanks when it was -40 or more...NOT fun and indeed life threatening if you aren't prepared for it.

Fairbanks has had much colder temps in the past, but still COLD is COLD!

Kind of like when I lived in Phoenix, it didn't seem to matter how many degrees it was over 100, HOT is HOT!

Cromagnet, that's quite the story! I'm glad everything turned out ok. I wish we had a Fairbanks flashaholic that posted in. My cousin currently is employed in Dillingham, AK and he says it is the scurge of life and can't wait to get back to Anchorage.

The coldest temperature I have experienced is -22°F (-30°C) in Juneau AK.
This is just cold enough for true ice fog, but conditions were clear with low humidity.

The coldest I've experienced was -28F with a -55F wind chill. A co-worker was out in those temperatures for 15 minutes to gas up his car and half of his face froze, leaving it paralyzed for a month! He did recover though.

-26 oF in Indianapolis.

Also only time my pipes froze.

wwglen

about 12F. And that was in utah. The coldest before was probably around 20F when I was living in southern California. I think that was in big bear.

I've been 4 wheeler riding in 0F weather. That was pretty cold @ 40 mph.

That's cold alright. Once you get below -30 it's hard to tell much of a difference though. While stationed in Antarctica for Operation Deep Freeze '90-91, we had to do a medivac to the South Pole station. When we landed and were getting ready to move the medical gear from the plane ot the building, the pilot let us know that it was -80F! The LC-130 was contrailing about 10 feet behind the props and it was like walking through a frozen fog storm to get from the cargo ramp to the station entrance. Only then did we realize that we didn't have the IV warmers with us. :-0 So I tied the two IV bags together with some string, hung them over my neck and zipped them up in my parka. I stuffed all of the loose tubing into my coat and walked next to the litter as we transferred the patient to the plane. In the minute or so it took to get him from the station to the plane the inch of IV tubing that was exposed had frozen and had to be thawed before we could get the IV's to flow again.

Funny how we can adapt to some pretty harsh environments. In Jan '01 we had a week of 50 F weather and everyone was walking around in t-shirts like we were at the beach.

Cheers,

- Mike

As I recall, the record low of Indiana and Illinois is -35 F which was in about 1992 or 1994.

I don't recall being around temps below about -15 but anywhere below about 5 degrees to me is in the 'pretty frickin cold' category.

I also remember being at the Mosters Of Rock concert in Dallas Texas in 1986, I think (maybe 1987) and it was about 105 official degrees but in the stadium, they said it was the equilavent of 126 degrees. There were people passing out and they were spraying us down with firehoses and whatnot.

Personally, I'll take the cold ANYDAY over the hot. You can always dress appropriately warm but it's pretty hard to take off a few layers of skin.

-50+ with wind of 30+ MPH.

All the transmission and rear ends were frozen, so it didn't matter if you got your car started, you weren't going anywhere.

Northern North Dakota, Mid 1990's.

Bill