CHICAGO — The city won’t be melting anytime soon.
A brutal cold snap putting Chicagoans through a “conveyor belt of cold” is sticking around through the week, said Dr. Scott Collis, an atmospheric scientist with the Argonne National Laboratory.
The coldest day of the week will be Tuesday — around zero degrees — and things will progressively warm to just a touch above zero the rest of the week, Collis said.
“Yesterday we got warmer than Anchorage, Alaska, for the first time since this thing started,” Collis said. “The cold pattern is going to linger.”
Thursday could reach up to 20 degrees, before temperatures dip again to the teens and zero degrees over the weekend, Collis said.
Sunday will “warm back up” to 20 degrees — and Tuesday late afternoon could see temperatures above freezing, Collis said. From there, we’ll likely return to Chicago’s warmer-than-seasonable pattern this winter, “but there’s uncertainty predicting more than seven days out,” Collis said.
CPS classes were cancelled Tuesday due to the harsh temperatures. Mayor Brandon Johnson also extended temporary stays for migrants at city shelters amid the cold snap.
The Kankakee River is jammed up with ice, and Lake Michigan has turned into somewhat of a hot spring as warmer lake water steams due to the brutally cold air.
Last week’s blizzard that hit large swaths of the Midwest with more than a foot of snow mostly spared Chicago, but its parting gift has been “attaching us to deep Arctic air,” Collis said.
“The Midwest gets such unique weather because we’re connected via land both to the warm Gulf and the Arctic cold, and we can draw our weather from either” Collis said. “This storm shifted the pattern, bringing a higher pressure system standing over our area.”
For now, stay inside or layer up, Collis said.
“On the bright side, this is going to make going back to the 20s and 30s feel rather nice,” Collis said. “Nobody is happier than a Chicagoan in the spring.”
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