Weather Service Rolls Out 'Extreme Cold Warning'

The National Weather Service is experimenting with a new type of warning for bitterly cold temperatures in Minnesota, with some parts of northern Wisconsin affected as well.

This winter the National Weather Service in Minnesota will stop issuing windchill warnings. Instead they’ll begin using “Extreme Cold Warnings.” Todd Shea is a Warning Coordination Meteorologist with the National Weather Service in La Crosse. He says it’s an attempt to simplify warnings when temperatures dip to dangerous levels.

“So, instead of differentiating between whether there’s a little bit of wind or not the idea is to have some type of warning when either the windchill or the basic air temperature reaches critical threshold,” Shea said.

That threshold is 35 degrees below zero. Shea says the Weather Service first implemented the “Extreme Cold Warning” system at the tail end of last winter but it never got cold enough to issue a warning. This year he says they’ll try it for a full season in hopes temperatures dip enough to see if the new warning works.

“It will be based on what kind of feedback we get in the agency from hospitals, emergency management partners, perhaps school officials, highway departments, groups that work or have staff members that are outdoors a lot and see if the information is easier to follow or not,” Shea said.

Weather Service stations in Minnesota will test the new “Extreme Cold Warning” but parts of western and northwestern Wisconsin that rely on weather alerts from the Twin Cities and Duluth will be part of the experiment as well.

This story by Rich Kremer first appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio.