Weather: Was it colder when you were a kid?

The old timers are always telling the younger generation how it was so much colder back when they were a kid. Is this true or just a bunch of talk?
What do you think?

Our weatherman had some interesting information about this this morning. He went back and counted the total number of days with highs less then 10 degrees here in Northeast Pennsylvania. Here is what he found.

YEARS TOTAL NUMBER OF DAYS

1970-1979 82 days
1980-1989 80 days

2014-2024 34 days Last 10 years

So, maybe the old timers were right.

As a kid growing up in the 1950s - 1960s, in northern NY lake effect country of the Tug Hill Plateau, with a bent toward the sciences, I distinctly remember looking forward to at least two periods, usually in Februrary, of experiencing temperatures as low as -40F (=-40C). We heated our home with a coal furnace before eventually upgrading to an oil furnace, as well as always having a wood stove in the kitchen. Now living not far away from the old homestead in the western Adirondack region, in recent years I have seen it only as low as -35F. It is this morning -8F as I write this.

About a dozen years ago, I participated in the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival parade, marching beside a Voyageur theme float including portaging canoes with a number of BSA wilderness guide program senior instructors wearing home made wool capotes. I do not recall what the nighttime temerature was, but all day during the parade the temp never got higher than -15F.

Penns Woods said:

The old timers are always telling the younger generation how it was so much colder back when they were a kid. Is this true or just a bunch of talk?
What do you think?

Click to expand...

If I'm considered an old timer, then yes, it was colder when we were growing up. There was a dip in the average annual highs and lows during the 60s and early 70s as shown in the following chart based on records from Burlington, VT. Basically a micro-ice age. And also interesting is how there's been a steady increase in average annual temps since then.

Yes it was colder. In the ‘60/70’s as a kid the town would flood an area to create a naturally frozen skating rink I would skate from December through march sometimes. The last ten years or so it didn’t freeze enough to skate and now they don’t even bother to flood it.
Jim

I thought snowfalls had decreased over the past few decades so this morning I looked at historical snowfall data for a few Midwestern towns I've lived in and found there's very little change. The year to year variation is much higher than the variation in 5 or 10 years averages. In other words, I was wrong. Just the typical old person poor memory I guess

I have no idea. I grew up in the 80's and 90's and of course what I remember is the extremely cold weather I suffered in childhood. I'm sure there were mild winters too but they didn't stick in my head.

We've had some very mild winters lately but I can also remember some extremely hard ones in the last decade. In particular a few years back we had zero snowfall with extremely cold temps that drove the frost deeper than anyone can remember. The number of people in town with frozen water lines was impressive and there were even some water towers in the area that froze.

Also, about 5 years ago, we set the record low temp (-32) as well as record wind chill (something like -85).

A guy I used to work with constantly talked about how much worse the snow used to be when he was a kid (60's/70's). It's possible the average snowfall was higher but when I looked up the 20 snowiest winters in Iowa 1998-2018 was better represented than 1960-1980.

I think technology has a lot to do with perception. When it's -20 degrees everything still works. Cars start. Equipment starts. Equipment has heated cabs. Things don't break down (for the most part). We have lightweight yet warm and comfortable clothing. It just isn't a very big deal. That wasn't the case in 1950.

The same can be said for snowfall when you look at the equipment we have for dealing with it. We had brutal snow about 10 years ago. I heard some old farmers comparing it to the winter of 1965 (the classic winter against which all others are judged) and a couple thought the current winter was just as bad or worse but that because of the snow handling equipment available it was easier to deal with.

Alan

Here in the Cleveland area, we definitely had more snow in the past. Temps seem similar.

When I first moved to the area 25 years ago, we consistently had a foot of snow on the ground. We’d ski for weeks straight. Now, we’re so excited to have 3-4” stick around a few days to bang our skis around on. Lake effect snow is not what it was. And now, our Great Lake is mostly ice covered.

The Carolinas of my youth were definitely warmer than the Alaska/Wyoming/Montana of my adulthood. But I still walked barefoot uphill in the snow to school, both ways. The polar bears got our adrenaline up so we stayed sorta warm.

Kids exaggerate everything, and older adults have hazy memories. Best to look it up. We know the Earth is warming because we can measure it. About 1.5 degrees C. Plenty of cities are warmer due to the effect on urban heat islands.

I lived in Colorado and then Wyoming in the 1980s. My friends always tell me "It hasn't been cold since you left."
I was out of my career working construction then around 1985. We were outside north of Denver, and for 10 days in a row, the warmest temperature was -7 degrees F. It was in the -30s every night the whole time. The low was -36F without the wind chill.

ppine said:

older adults have hazy memories

Click to expand...

I think we all have hazy memories when it comes to weather. About 15 years ago I kept a journal for a few years and I often wrote about the weather. Because I was taking the time to think about it and write it down I had a pretty good memory of what the previous few seasons had been like and I was surprised how few people remembered what the previous winter had been like, even when they had been somewhat memorable due to mildness/severity.

I no longer keep the journal and without it I'm often surprised how little I remember about the previous seasons. I can remember last winter was extremely mild (record warmth) with little snow but I have no idea what the winter before that was like. If last year wasn't such an anomaly I probably wouldn't remember it either.

Alan

I remember winter being harsher as a kid. But then again all my winter clothing was mismatched hand-me-downs. Had a wood furnace in a drafty old farmhouse. Frost on your bedroom walls in the morning. Got dressed under the blankets and then huddled around the gas oven before running out to catch the school bus.

I studied meteorology in college and worked with it a lot on the job. Look up the data.

Here's a comparison of snowfall and precipitation totals for Burlington, VT since 1942. Unfortunately they don't have complete records before then. Lots of variability from year to year, though there appears to have been more consistent snowfall in 60s and 70s, which is what I remember.

I grew up and still live in the capital district (Albany Schenectady Troy NY).
I clearly remember ice skating on black ice (shallow vernal ponds) the day before Halloween 1969.
That same year, we had a -24F Christmas Eve.
Throughout my youth, snow that fell in November was still on the ground in April.
Every later winter, there were big ice jams on the Mohawk River. I was just driving over the Mohawk this past Sunday, it was mostly open...
And I remember an unusually warm New Years Day in 1974, 52F, I went for a 20 mile bike ride and there were still ice skaters on Iriquois Lake (Central Park, Schenectady).

Looking back on the archival data is funny for me now...the weather and snowfall totals from my formative years wee actually anomalies, but without another lifetime for comparison, seemed normal.
I looked at historical data from the dates that Lake Champlain froze and thawed, if anyone cares to look, you'll see there's no disputing the overall warming trend.

All of this is particularly distressing for me, an avid back country alpine skier...

I grew up about 20-30 miles south of @yknpdlr, near Syracuse, in the same era. We got a week of bitter cold, the "Siberian High" or "Alberta Clipper"/polar vortex being a normal thing every couple years in Jan or Feb, bringing temps a little below zero F... I also remember a thing we called the "January Thaw", which was a period of above-freezing temps for about 3-4 days. About every 11th winter seemed much harder than the others, and a couple years it got into the -20s at night, -teens during the day. Seems like we got a little more snow then too. My parents still live in the same house; 60 years there. Dad says it seems a little warmer and less snowy the past 30 years or so.

Oh, the famous "January Thaw". Usually happened around the 10th of the month melting all of the winter snow so far. When I was quite involved with BSA, we too often had our Council winter training outing scheduled around that weekend, Gawasa/Ookpik. Gawasa, the Iroquois snow snake, an ornately carved stick that was raced down hill on an iced track, and Ookpik, the white snowy owl watching over the games. It was commonly understood that to be counted as a winter camp outing, the temperature had to be below 50F. Often the January thaw would melt everything and remain above 50 degrees for the entire weekend. Formally not really a winter event. But they had fun anyway learning and building natural material stick debris and tarp shelters.

But in those years when there was no thaw and we had our more normal lake effect cold snow dump when the boys got trained indoors and given or self made warm winter gear before going out to make their snow shelters, Quinzees, trench shelters or other kinds of natural material shelters.
I always made my quinzee snow mound when I could with enough available snow. The problem was, you have to begin early in the afternoon, pile up an 8' high mound of loose snow, wait an hour or two for it to sinter and become firm enough before digging out the interior into a living space sleeping platform. By that time you are wet, not just from laying in the snow while digging inside, but also from sweat of the hard work. I always wore a rainsuit over minimal winter clothing to do the job. But once done it is more than comfortable inside. One memorable year the temperature overnight dipped to -30F. The kids in tarp covered trenches had early on moved into the nearby dining hall to sleep next to the wood stove. But with the heat of myself in my sleeping bag and two small candles burning in my snow shelter, the temperature inside was an almost too warm +25 all night.
It was Sunday morning, and after breakfast only one or two cars had enough battery juice to start, which had to be used to jump start everyone else to go home.

The weather is definitely changing up here. When I first arrived in Northern Ontario in 1989, there were long stretches of -30 to -40 temperatures in the winter. Polar highs would move in and settle for 4 to 6 weeks at a time. This trend usually started around Christmas and would let up around the end of February.

The last three or four years have been a lot warmer. Last winter we did not hit -40. This year, we finally hit it again, two days ago, but we are now climbing back up again, it's going back up to -10 C (14 F), which is the perfect winter temp for me.

Wildlife species and vegetation from the south are also moving north at a very fast rate. Turkey buzzards arrived about 20 years ago. Pelicans were unheard of 20 years ago, and are now a plague on our lakes. Anyway, I am prone to old man rambling now, but the climate is changing up here, and I'm a big fan, two days ago I found -42 to be very repulsive.

Penns Woods said:

The old timers are always telling the younger generation how it was so much colder back when they were a kid. Is this true or just a bunch of talk?
What do you think?

Our weatherman had some interesting information about this this morning. He went back and counted the total number of days with highs less then 10 degrees here in Northeast Pennsylvania. Here is what he found.

YEARS TOTAL NUMBER OF DAYS

1970-1979 82 days
1980-1989 80 days

2014-2024 34 days Last 10 years

So, maybe the old timers were right.

Click to expand...

I saw that too, you must be watching Joe Snedeker.

A slight difference in average annual temperature would be hard to detect. But even without a thermometer it's obvious that there are now huge temperature swings that are much more frequent then they used to be.

In Anchorage we used to get the "January Thaw" it was warm temps with high winds and lasted about three days. Now almost every storm that we get is warm and windy, and we get about two storms or more per month. There used to be snow on the ground by Halloween but now we aren't even sure we'll have a white Xmas. There were 110mph winds at my house about a week ago and over 160 mph at a popular back country ski area just south of town. I spoke with a neighbor last night who said they are expecting more rain. I just saw on this mornings news that Anchorage only had 3.8" inches of snow since December 1st.

In the Poconos my lake froze by Thanksgiving, but thawed and refroze two or three times since. Some years the ice doesn't form enough to ice fish or skate, and this area was a Mecca for ice harvesting. We've gotten between 45 and 50 inches of snow but it had totally melted three times. The rain events that we get are much bigger than in the past. Multiple inches in a day was unheard in the past, but now happens pretty regular with bridges damaged, roads washed out and flash flooding. It was minus 8 F at my house this morning but I don't take that as a sign that there is no global warming.

In the North East, like Vermont, they may get as much snow as used to. Maybe even more if Lake Champlain doesn't freeze, but I wonder if the snowpack gets as deep or stays as long as it used to. Especially considering that night time lows have gone up even more than daytime highs have.

I would also be concerned if I had a place on Tug Hill. As much snow as they get they could get even more as the lakes freeze later. I would also be worried about a big rain event combined with warm temps and the damage it could cause with that deep snow pack.

I don't think we need data and statistics to know it ain't like it used to be.

memaquay said:

The weather is definitely changing up here. When I first arrived in Northern Ontario in 1989, there were long stretches of -30 to -40 temperatures in the winter. Polar highs would move in and settle for 4 to 6 weeks at a time. This trend usually started around Christmas and would let up around the end of February.

The last three or four years have been a lot warmer. Last winter we did not hit -40. This year, we finally hit it again, two days ago, but we are now climbing back up again, it's going back up to -10 C (14 F), which is the perfect winter temp for me.

Wildlife species and vegetation from the south are also moving north at a very fast rate. Turkey buzzards arrived about 20 years ago. Pelicans were unheard of 20 years ago, and are now a plague on our lakes. Anyway, I am prone to old man rambling now, but the climate is changing up here, and I'm a big fan, two days ago I found -42 to be very repulsive.

Click to expand...

the two most obvious changes I've seen are the continued blasts of lake effect snow because of it being too warm for the Great Lakes to freeze over, allowing the wind to pick up huge amounts of extra moisture- normally by this time of year they're frozen and the air is too cold to pick up as much moisture, or carry it inland.
there's also the fact that my town used to traditionally have an Xmas Eve and New Years Day skate on our mill pond with hot chocolate and marshmallows every year, but in the last 10-15 years the local pond hasn't even frozen until mid January if at all.

I didn't live here until '75. But I can say that the trend since about the late eighties has been warmer, if not drier. We've had a lot of precipitation so far this winter. But like last winter, our snow levels have been mostly historically high. The other side of the state though continues to have lots of cold and snow. So.....(shrug)