The temperature reached 20 below Sunday morning in Fargo-Moorhead. At 6 pm, it was still one below, but the temperature rose during the night so that it was a comfortable 20 degrees above zero at 6 am Monday.
A number of people have written, wondering how the temperature was able to rise so much overnight, when the sun wasn’t shining. Actually, the sun does not warm the air very much in winter, anyway.
The typical night to day temperature range is less than 20 degrees and can be less than five degrees in cloudy weather. This makes it easy for approaching air which is much warmer or much colder than the air in place, to cause the local temperature to either rise at night or fall during the day. This happens roughly once a week in our region during winter, but not always to the degree it happened Sunday night.
