When I returned home to Kansas City at the beginning of December, I was pleased to be able to go outside without a scarf or a hat. For at least those first two days it was pleasant here, with temperatures in the 40s and 50s Fahrenheit. I got pretty lucky with my own long drive west being during such a warm spell. The only snow I saw was in Michigan along I-94. Even in Chicago, a city famous for winter snow, I found only rain. So, when I first read that we were expecting a surge of Arctic winds to descend south down the Great Plains into the United States from Canada around Christmas, I, like everyone else, braced for the impact. 

The worst of the cold began to arrive here on Wednesday, 21 December, with temperatures that night reaching below 0ºF and wind chills well into the negative double digits with the cold bottoming out around -35ºF (-37ºC). Things didn’t really improve for a while just yesterday we started to see regular temperatures above freezing again. At first, I thought this storm was going to miss the Northeast, that it was something we’d have here in the Midwest, but as the week went by I watched as the storm moved across the continental radar first in a southeasterly direction across the Midwest giving what turned out to be a mere glancing blow to Kansas City, before turning northeast with the influence of Gulf and Atlantic winds and heading straight up the East Coast. 

Now, as I write this the City of Buffalo and its suburbs remain buried under feet of snow with nearly 30 dead. Air travel remains broken down across the Midwest and East, and journalists & meteorologists alike are calling this one “the storm of the century.” It proves that for all our technology and innovations, we remain subject to the whims of the weather. On a normal day someone with enough income could conceivably commute by air from one region of this country to another for work, perhaps not on a daily basis but certainly on a weekly one. Yet when extreme cold and blinding snow such as this barrel across North America we’re at its mercy.The funny thing about the last week is that looking ahead to the next few days things are supposed to greatly improve. Not only are we in Kansas City forecasted to rise out of our current frozen state but our temperatures are apparently supposed to climb back up into the high 50s Fahrenheit, warm enough for a nice walk in the park without a scarf, warm enough for some rain to wash away at least some of the snow and salt that’s making our streets and sidewalks dangerous to pass. Maybe that’s a good sign for 2023, that the new year will arrive to better weather than 2022 is leaving behind.