{"id":1561,"date":"2020-05-09T22:24:03","date_gmt":"2020-05-10T02:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/?p=1561"},"modified":"2020-05-09T22:24:03","modified_gmt":"2020-05-10T02:24:03","slug":"2020-05-09-record-cold-freeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/2020\/2020-05-09-record-cold-freeze\/","title":{"rendered":"2020.05.09: Record Cold Freeze"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s May 9th and snowing! “Yes, Pittsburgh is in the upper-20s. That will make it the 8th time in our climate records that Pittsburgh has observed temperatures below 30 degrees in the month of May.” (source: National Weather Service (NWS) Pittsburgh<\/a>). But still not as bad as May 9th in 1966 when Pittsburgh got 3 inches of snow<\/a>! I took in the figs since I had moved them out of the basement last weekend.<\/p>\n

Out of curiosity, a few weeks ago I looked up the Pittsburgh McKeesport Airport (closest official NWS station to where I live) data for the past 30 years to get a sense of when the last freeze and frost generally is. The further into spring you get, the less likely it is to have a freeze or frost. The NWS nicely lists the probabilities for “historically, there has been a 90% chance of it being this cold after this date” from 90% all the way down to 10%. I graphed the data and came up with:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’m assuming freeze is 32 F or below and frost is 36 or below. I also fit a 2nd order polynomial but honestly as today has showed (freeze on 05\/09 when the graph snows a near zero probability of that happening), there are plenty of outliers. Anyhow, I thought the data was interesting and depending on my risk tolerance lets me guess when to put out my plants (in conjunction with a 10 day forecast!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s May 9th and snowing! “Yes, Pittsburgh is in the upper-20s. That will make it the 8th time in our…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gardening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1561"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1561\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}