CHICAGO’S WILDEST WEATHER EVENTS OF THE 2010s: HEAT WAVES. POLAR VORTEXES. AND EVEN A DOUBLE DERECHO.
Wondering what the wettest, warmest or weirdest Chicago-area weather events of the 2010s were?
So were the meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Chicago who realized even they couldn’t come to a consensus because such events often are subjective, said meteorologist Ricky Castro.
The experts decided to instead invite weather enthusiasts to vote in a series of polls posted on social media. And while thousands of people voted, the experts say the result is not a definitive list of the most record-breaking events. But, Castro said, it was a whole lot of fun for everyone involved.
“From working here, we have our own institutional knowledge of these events,” said Castro, who worked in Chicago for the whole of the decade. “If you were to ask people here, we’d probably have a slightly different list than the one we put out in the end, but it was a pretty interesting exercise and fun for people to get involved in this way.”
The meteorologists set up a sort of playoff-style set of Twitter polls, to take account of things like people forgetting events that happened longer ago.
They also knew enough not to assume the general public remembers events as clearly or fully as the meteorologists themselves. Castro says he has a reputation in the office for being able to not only remember the date on which an event occurred but to also rattle off specifics such as temperatures, snowfall totals, wind speeds or river levels.
“I have a crazy memory when it comes to weather events, even for this place,” Castro said, laughing. “You could quibble with a couple items I guess, but you wouldn’t say any that made the list are out of place.”
With his own memory of covering the events the weather service included in polling, he said if he had voted, some of the winners would’ve been bumped. So what would his list include? “There were a couple pretty big flooding events earlier in the decade. To me, those may have been more historic overall,” he said.
“February 2015 tied for coldest overall month since 1983. In June of ’15, we had the largest hailstone ever recorded in the state. It was nearly 5 inches. But it makes sense most people probably wouldn’t remember the largest hailstone,” he said with a laugh. “December of ’15 was the warmest December in more than 90 years.”
The weather service also ranked the top 20 weather events of the previous century, using more objective standards.
The following is the list of the most important meteorological events of the 2010s in Chicago as determined by participants in polls posted by National Weather Service staff on Twitter and Facebook, beginning with No. 10. received more snow, such as 22 inches in Lincolnshire. The city also endured blizzard conditions for 12 straight hours.