OKLAHOMA - Oklahoma experienced a historic cold air event during February 2021, boosting the month into the company of other legendary frozen periods from years back. February 1895, February 1899, and January 1930 all suffered through exceedingly long cold spells. More recently, December 1983 still lives in the minds of many Oklahomans as the bellwether of cold months, which followed those winters of the late 1970s.
Oklahoma experienced a blast of Arctic air on Feb. 7, dropping temperatures across the state into the 20s and 30s. Several rounds of freezing drizzle provided treacherous travel conditions across the state. Temperatures continued to plummet over the next 7-10 days, culminating with historically cold air Feb. 14-16. The statewide average temperature on Feb. 15 was minus 0.7 degrees, more than 40 degrees below normal and the single coldest day statewide since at least 1915.
Feb. 15-16 and Feb. 14-16 also set records as the coldest 2-day and 3-day periods at -0.1 degrees and 2.1 degrees, respectively. Lowest minimum and maximum temperature records fell throughout the state over those days. The records for 4-day through 7-day periods were all set in Dec. 1983.
Unlike many of the state’s garden variety cold spells, the February 2021 event extended to Oklahoma’s southern border and beyond. Ninety-six of the Mesonet’s 120 sites recorded their all-time record low temperature on either Feb. 15 or Feb. 16.
Mesonet temperature data go back to 1997. Overnight on Feb. 16, all 120 Mesonet sites were below zero for the first time in its history. The Mesonet site at Broken Bow reached a low of minus 9 degrees on Feb. 16, topping the town’s previous all-time record low of minus 5 degrees set at the National Weather Service’s (NWS) cooperative observer site on both Jan. 12 and Jan. 22, 1918.
The cooperative site at Idabel reached a low of minus 12 degrees the morning of the 16th, breaking the previous all-time record low of minus 11 degrees from Feb. 2, 1951. Healdton’s minus 17 degrees from the 16th now tops all its record lows dating back to 1894. Oklahoma City’s minus 14 degrees on Feb. 16 is its second lowest temperature on record behind minus 17 degrees from Feb. 12, 1899.
Tulsa’s minus 14 degrees, also on the 16th, is its fourth lowest temperature dating back to 1905, with a top mark of minus 16 degrees from Jan. 22, 1930. At least eight long-term NWS sites with periods of record of more than 70 years broke their all-time record lows during the event. Even the high temperatures were extraordinarily cold, at times below the record daily low temperatures.
Billings and Medford both recorded high temperatures of 1 degree—Billings on the 16th and Medford on the 15th—which would have broken the previous record low temperatures for the day at those locations. That feat was repeated across the state numerous times between Feb. 14 and Feb. 16.
The statewide average temperature for the month was 31 degrees according to preliminary data from the Oklahoma Mesonet, the sixth coldest February on record and an astounding 11.1 degrees below normal. The record belongs to February 1905 at 27.6 degrees. February was also the 20th coldest of any calendar month out of a possible 1513 months dating back to 1895, well short of January 1940’s record lowest of 23.7 degrees.
Weather data comes from Oklahoma Mesonet, a world-class network of environmental monitoring stations. The network was designed and implemented by scientists at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and at Oklahoma State University (OSU).
The Oklahoma Mesonet was commissioned on January 1, 1994 and consists of 120 automated stations covering Oklahoma. There is at least one Mesonet station in each of Oklahoma's 77 counties.
At each site, the environment is measured by a set of instruments located on or near a 10-meter-tall tower. The measurements are packaged into "observations" every 5 minutes, then the observations are transmitted to a central facility every 5 minutes, 24 hours per day year-round.
