One Meteorologist Predicting Wicked Arctic Blast For North Dakota

Extreme Meteorologist Reed Timmer on his Facebook page recently shared an arctic blast of biblical proportions.

He goes on to say in this post, that this could be a temperature anomaly that will have morning low temperatures all the way down to -20 as far south as Arkansas.

"This could be the coldest air mass since the 1990s, and the most classic southern US-coastal storm type snow storm since 2010."

These are actual "raw" air temperatures, and not wind chills.

Check out this map of expected overnight low temperatures for the morning of January 11th, which will be one week from tomorrow.

Eastern North Dakota is expected to see the brunt of the coldest weather with overnight low temperatures at minus 21 in Grand Forks and Fargo will bottom out at minus 17.

Bismarck and Minot will be considerably warmer at overnight lows in the single digits below zero. We will likely be a little colder THIS weekend in western North Dakota with overnight lows.

However, other long-range weather forecasts do not show an arctic blast at all for us in North Dakota.

Check out this long-range forecast from the Weather Channel for Bismarck.

This forecast is showing overnight low temperatures in the teens for next weekend. That's a big difference for sure.

It sure would be nice to be a meteorologist, you get to be right 20% of the time and still keep your job.

Anyway, we have a huge discrepancy between these two forecasts.  I wouldn't worry too much about cold temperatures. After all, it's January in North Dakota. It's expected.

Take the two different forecasts and split the difference. That's probably closer to the truth.