Since 1881, there have only been nine winter seasons in Fargo Moorhead in which the temperature has not gotten as cold as 20 below.
Four of those nine have been in the past 18 years. The other five are spread out over the other 119 winters.
During the very cold 1880s and 1890s, the average number of 20 below nights a winter was 18. The most was 39 nights in the winter of 1886-87.
Over the first half of the 20th Century, the average dropped to about nine 20 below nights per winter. During the second half of the century, the average increased to a little over ten per winter, mostly due to some cold winters from the early 1960s through the early 1980s. So far in the new millennium, the average has dropped to just four per winter. This small sample since 2000 could be a temporary aberration, but the trend is clear. Twenty below does not happen as often as it once did.
