Ticker for February 19, 2025

                
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February 19, 2025  February 19, 2025  February 19, 2025  February 19, 2025


Chiller




Some folks, including myself, have said this would be the coldest air of the
season...but is it though?





Debatable, probably for all but NW OK, but it's still the action thriller you
DIDN'T want to see. One of the coldest late-February outbreaks of frigid air is
underway, with a couple more days to go.

Lots of records fell yesterday, and that's even with the "warm" air right after
midnight fouled up the lows and highs (shown conspicuously as all the 40s in
the SE half of the state in the highs department).









And then records fell this morning, and again they shall fall this afternoon. You
know, for miserable consistency.









Oof! If we do see highs that low (follow me here), we'll set the all-time lowest
high temperature for a Feb. 19 in Oklahoma, dating back to the 1880s. The old
record is 15 degrees back at Goodwell and Keystone Dam on this date in 2006,
which was obviously a very frigid day.



We didn't really have a chance to beat the lowest low record, because 2021. We
got close, though!



There's always tomorrow, though.





I think those temps are a bit over-cooked with the snow and ice around, so maybe
a bit cooler than that. Again though, tough to beat 2021 in some places, which
continues to lend credence (Hey, watch the Credence, man!!) to the idea that
the Feb. 2021 Deep Freeze remains the Granddaddy of all mid- to late-February
extended cold air outbreaks.

Then we had the Feb. 24-26, 2003, event that sort of rivals our current frigid
outbreak (Feb. 25 shown as an example of the cold air that year).





And don't forget (I can't since I'm the one that catalogs...catalogues for our
English friends...this stuff) the early March 2014 visit from Siberia.

Amember this from March 3, 2014?





March 4 was only slightly better.



You can see it on our statewide avg. highs and lows time series from 2014.





So we're not out of the woods yet. Heck, we're not even out of this copse
of seedlings (I have no idea how I knew what "copse" meant...must have read it
somewhere). But, there is hope for the horizon...frozen that it is. Temps will
rebound for the weekend, and we'll be back ABOVE normal by early next week.





Well, I've bugged you enough on this Day 2 of our February 2025 Deep Freeze
event. Continue to hunker, and feed that hunger, and soon you'll be catching
lunkers, and soon our temps will be even crunker.

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climate Survey
gmcmanus@ou.edu