The 1976–77 Winter in the Contiguous United States in Comparison with Past Records

Abstract

The 1976?77 winter season is compared with earlier winters with respect to temperature and beating degree days. Comparisons are based on 1) station data; 2) composite indices derived from a combination of a few very long-term station records; 3) areally weighted state and regional temperature averages; and 4) population weighted beating degree days. Major conclusions are as follows: 1) January 1977 was possibly the coldest month experienced in the eastern half of the country in the past 200 years. 2) The 1976?77 winter was not a record-breaker for temperature for the contiguous 48 states as a whole, but set a new record for fuel demand because of the extreme cold in highly populated areas. 3) Relatively coarse networks of stations can be used for monitoring large-scale anomalous weather features; they allow use of continuous records covering more than 100 years for which dense networks do not exist. They also allow near-real-time assessment of anomalous weather events at a small fraction of the time and money needed to process data from a large number of stations.