April 2018 One For the Record Books

If you are a farmer, there are some records you wish would not be broken, especially weather related. I have said many times I would be very happy with "normal" weather. Well, this April has been anything but normal. The Southern Research and Outreach Center has an official weather station with data going back more than 100 years. A number of records have been broken or will be this month.

Thursday I was talking with Tom Hoverstad who is a scientist at the Southern Research and Outreach Center at Waseca. The first record to fall occurred early in April. On April 7, 2018 we saw a high temperature of 20 degrees. That was the lowest daily high temperature in April ever recorded. If it seemed like we have gotten a lot of snow this month your are right.

Before the snow last weekend the experiment station had received 19.5 inches of snow in April. The April snow record was 20.5 inches of. They received 3.4 inches last weekend so we now have another new snow record, 22.9 inches. There is at least one more record that will be set. The only question is by how much.

Tom said that many days this month we have seen temperatures 15 to 20 degrees colder than normal. Even if we have normal temperatures the rest of this month we will still break the cold temperature record by 3 degrees. Yes, the coldest April ever, by 3 degrees! That is breaking the average monthly temperature by a huge amount!

There is one more record that may fall yet this month. The ice out date on Clear Lake in Waseca. The latest ice out date is April 27th. It would appear there is a very good chance that record will be broken too. So, if it seemed to you that April has been very cold with a lot of snow, it was not your imagination.