At times in January, Chicago was colder than the South Pole, while flowers bloomed out of season in balmy Juneau, Alaska.
Driven by contorted bends of the jet stream, cold snaps and snow kept Northern and Southern states in a deep freeze, while unusually warm weather and record drought gripped the far West. The U.S. has been a country divided by temperature extremes, in a winter of record Western highs and bone-chilling Eastern lows, federal climate experts and private meteorologists said. A formal federal tally of January's temperature trends won't be completed for weeks, but preliminary regional data compiled by commercial meteorologists suggest that the Eastern half of the country is experiencing one of its 10 coldest winters on record—with thousands of local records for cold already tied or broken. By contrast, California, Alaska and the Western U.S. are having one of the 10 warmest winters, with several cities setting records in January for high temperatures. "We are talking about significant departures from normal," said meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, chief forecaster at Weatherbell Analytics LLC, a commercial forecasting company based in New York.
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