By Chip Redmond
The cold is coming. The Kansas Mesonet’s Freeze Monitor (mesonet.ksu.edu/freeze) returns again for the fall frost/freeze season. It contains some new features. This tool focuses on displaying the coldest temperatures observed across Kansas during the previous 24 hours. This answers the frequent question: How cold did it get last night? It also tracks the first fall freeze date for each station for comparison to local climatology. Data will update every five minutes on both the map and table.
Important for producers and gardeners, the lowest temperatures below freezing will also be addressed in a new feature this year. This feature allows users to select options to view maps/data of the duration below freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit) and also the number of hours below 24 degrees. While both are of interest, the lower threshold is of great importance to wheat growers later into the fall season.
Figure 1: Preview of the Freeze Monitor webpage: mesonet.ksu.edu/freeze
Also new this year, the data displayed in the tables below the maps are sortable. By clicking on the header of a particular column, it will sort the table by that column. This makes it much easier to see what area was the coldest in the state, as well as earliest freeze and earliest climatological freeze data. This table can also be copied from the browser and pasted into a spreadsheet for further analysis.
Figure 2: Select headers (highlighted) to sort the table data from lowest to highest.
For cold temperatures further into winter, the Freeze Monitor will not be active but the maximum and minimum temperatures can still be viewable on their particular pages along with the maximum wind gusts:
http://mesonet.k-state.edu/weather/maxmin/
Expect the Freeze Monitor to return in the spring as a new growing season arrives.