Saturday was the coldest day in Calgary in almost two-years

CALGARY – No doubt you have noticed how cold it has been lately-and that complaint is totally legitimate.

Saturday was officially the coldest day in Calgary in almost two-years. What does that mean exactly? In weather you’ll often hear forecasters talk about daytime highs and daytime lows. As we look ahead in weather these highs and lows are forecasted temperatures or predictions. But when we look in the past, these terms reference data that was gathered by Environment Canada.

For our city, these official temperatures and weather observations come from the Calgary International Airport.

The official low temperature at the airport for Saturday Jan. 9, 2016 was -25.5 C. That makes it the coldest temperature since Mar. 2, 2014 when it hit -30.3 C. And that’s not even factoring in the wind-chill.

At around 4 a.m. Saturday, Calgary recorded a wind-chill value of -35. In layman’s terms, while the temperature was -25 degrees Celsius, the wind made it feel like it was -35.

If we look at the other side of the daily observations, the daytime high, Friday is also notable. It was -13.1 C. That means that we did not ever get warmer than -13.1 C that day. Where that becomes significant is when you look back on our past year of weather.

Since Jan. 6, 2015 there has only been one daytime high colder than Friday; Christmas Day’s high temperature was recorded at -14.6 C.

Taking this even further, Saturday is day eight of consecutive freezing daytime highs. In other words, we have not made it above zero since Jan. 1.  The last time we have had a streak this long was Nov. to Dec. of 2014.

There is still more to this story.

If you look at the past 30 days here in Calgary, 25 of those days have been below zero. Of the five that were above zero, two of them were just barely. (0.4 C and 0.7 C)

It’s not all bad news though. Our average daytime high for those 30 days is between -1 to -3 degrees Celsius. We hit or exceeded our average high one-third of the time in that period.

The best news of all, is that things are turning around Sunday with an expected high of at least zero. And by the middle of the week we should hit 2 C.