Frigid spells not welcome!

Forsyth MO. – It was not very surprising that my little town of Forsyth Missouri, situated in the southwestern corner of the state, might get some cold air filtering down from the northern tier from time to time. On January the 28^th that time had apparently swung around.

Note: Cold to my way of thinking, real cold that is, happens whenever the mercury reads in the teens overnight. (Temperatures like that oftentimes cause my furnace to run like the devil)! And, it you add the insult of those readings to less than really cold daytime readings, well then, that's a definite problem!

The National Weather Service published this graphic on Saturday, January the 26^th.  It didn't take a genius to figure out that Tuesday and Wednesday (the 29th and 30th) were 'likely' going to cause some people some trouble. A high of 30°F and a low of 13°F averaged out to just about 21.5 degrees and that level of cold was more than low enough to freeze unprotected pipes and to kill pets, if left unattended outside. (I took some solace from the fact that those forecasts were for the Springfield MO area, which was about sixty mile to the north of my town). Still, I knew that it was going to be cold enough down my way to likely cause my electric company in Canada some great joy!

SOME PERSPECTIVE

Up to this point in time, the average recorded temperature had been at about 38.9 degrees. That was a few degrees above the normal of 33 for this time of year. (Global warming?). Even so, as the scatter chart at left illustrates, I was burning quite a bit of power just to stay warm! (For those not accustomed to this kind of chart, the y axis represents kilowatt hours used versus the average recorded temperature for the day. Basically, the colder it gets the more electrical power used as my place is all electric)! Note that, whenever the average temperature drops below 25 degrees the power trend tends to wander up off the scale! Not good, as even a 70 kWh day equated to about nine dollars real money!

So, the stage was set. I'll post a followup after we get through that period of time! www.taneyweather.com