USA TODAY International Edition
Shivery April breaks USA’s 21-year record
If you thought it was unusually cold last month, you were right: April 2018 was the USA’s coldest April in 21 years, a new report says.
And for two states in the Upper Midwest — Iowa and Wisconsin — it was the coldest April since records began in 1895.
“Both states shattered their previous records from 1907 by about 1.5 degrees, an impressive crushing” of the former record, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Jonathan Erdman.
Record-breaking snow also accompanied the cold in many areas, wreaking havoc with baseball schedules and seriously delaying the onset of spring.
During April, the average U.S. temperature was 48.9 degrees, which was 2.2 degrees below average, “making it the 13th-coldest April on record and the coldest since 1997,” the report said.
The climate report was released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The cold was due to “a persistent flow of Arctic air that blanketed the eastern two-thirds of the nation,” the report noted.
Midwestern cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago and Green Bay, Wis., recorded one of their top-five coldest Aprils.
Every state east of the Rockies was colder than average.
Nationally, the April snow cover for the month was the fifth-largest on record for April and the largest since 1997. Several towns and cities in the northcentral U.S. had their snowiest April.
The West was the one part of the nation that saw a warmer-than-average April. Arizona, for example, had its second-warmest April on record with a statewide temperature about 6.3 degrees warmer than average.
Alaska also was warmer than average, which caused sea ice in the Bering Sea to be at its lowest level since at least 1850.
But the cold central and eastern U.S. was the outlier: Although the U.S. shivered, most of the rest of the world was unusually warm, The Washington
Post reported.
Official global April data from NOAA and NASA will be released later this month.
From January through April, the U.S. saw the coldest start to the year since 2014, NOAA said.