It has to be exceptionally cold for a professional weather forecaster in Montana to describe a -52 degree wind chill as having “not been too bad.”But that wind chill temperature, recorded atop MacDonald Pass west of Helena Thursday morning, paled in comparison to other wind chills and air temps recorded across western Montana as a blast of arctic air froze the state.
We created our own cloud @ -17° F (-27° C) at the #Missoula International Airport #mtwx [7am MST 12/22/2022] pic.twitter.com/uZ4n5lAD9t
— NWS Missoula (@NWSMissoula) December 22, 2022
Travis Booth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Missoula forecast office, said on Thursday that Kalispell recorded a new daily record low temperature for Dec. 22. The old record for Dec. 22, set in 1990, was -12 degrees. On Thursday morning, it was -33 degrees in Kalispell. The frigid morning…