One of the things I've gotten in the habit of doing before heading outside is checking the local weather. Since the NWS site at the airport is about twenty miles away, I've been using the USGS site at the Little Chena bridge on the Hot Springs Road, which is just a couple of miles down the road. Primarily a hydrometric site, in the winter it's only reporting air temperature (https://waterdata.usgs.gov/ak/nwis/uv/?site_no=15511000).
The idea here is that in the winter, it's a lot colder down in the "frozen flats" due to low temperature inversions, so that the relatively warmer temperatures at our house in the hills don't always reflect what's going on in the valley (New Years 1/2/18).
But this year it didn't seem so obvious, so I got the idea of plotting up a graph of the minimum temps at the Little Chena site, the NWS airport site, and at our place at 10 mile in the hills to see how they'd compare. While the Little Chena was similar to the airport when it was real cold, the temps were closer to the hills in milder weather. Kind of surprising, but that's science for you, you really don't know until you look at the data, and even then sometimes you still don't know what's going on!
Here's the updated chart of the temperature data through March 1; if nothing else it's interesting to see the wild temp swings we're getting this winter.
Also plotted up the max temps from Dec 1 to Mar 1. Not sure if it adds much, except that the high temps are a lot closer together at all sites than the low temps.
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