It may seem as though our current cold snap has gone on forever. But in reality, it has been about a week. After two months of mostly much-above-average temperatures, it has now been cold a week and it seems as if it has always been cold.
We're like that, I guess, most of us. We are naïve about weather. We forget that last October was a cold and wet month sandwiched in between a sunny, warm September and a sunny, mild November. We don't understand that while the average date of the last frost of the spring is in mid-May, the actual final frost can vary from mid-April to mid-June. We fail to grasp that while Devils Lake has grown larger than anyone alive today has seen, it has been much larger within the past several hundred years.
Most people just do not have enough perspective to realize that most weather that seems to us to be unusual is actually not unusual at all.
Have a weather question you'd like answered? E-mail weather@wday.com ,
or write to WDAY Stormtracker, WDAY-TV, Box 2466, Fargo, ND 58108
