Warm Here But Cold Elsewhere

It may be very warm in South Dakota for this time of the year, but it is extremely cold in other parts of the country. This is pretty typical, when one area of the globe is extremely warm, another one will be extremely cold. It is earth's way of trying to balance out the temperatures the globe's temperature. Well it can work on a smaller scale as well. So there is usually a direct link between our weather and Alaska's weather. If we are extremely warm and dry then typically Alaska will be very cold and wet and vise versa. Boy has this been the case. Temperatures here have been ranging 10-20 degrees above average the last couple of weeks. Well Alaska went into the deep freeze this past weekend with temperatures some 20-40 degrees below normal. Just look below at the last three days of highs and lows in North America. The lows are on the left and the highs are on the right (If you click on the images, you will be able to read the numbers).



Realizing its Alaska, 40 below zero doesn't sound that unusually cold, and its not. But they will typically see those temperatures in the middle of January when many areas haven't seen daylight in a month or more. These cold readings are a good 6-8 weeks early and many areas up there are seeing one of the coldest Novembers in the last 30 years. So just remember how lucky we have it right now because I'm sure our temperatures will look like that sometime this winter. At least for us, it's only a few short weeks out of the year.

~KDLT Meteorologist Cody Matz