MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — It was so cold Thursday that several outdoor winter events in the Twin Cities were called off.
And, according to the forecast, the worst may be yet to come.
Called off was the St. Paul Winter Carnival's Moon Glow Pedestrian Parade, the kickoff celebration for an outdoor festival that grew more than a century ago It';s from an east-coast reporter's taunt about the Twin Cities being an uninhabitable winter wasteland.
But other events planned for the coming weekend are set to go on as scheduled.
"It's cold, but we're going to have a carnival," said organizer Jennifer Tamburo. "That's what we celebrate."
This weekend is the US Pond Hockey Championships on frozen Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis. The competition for the coveted golden shovel goes all weekend, but with wind chills dipped to double-digits below zero, Thursday's Youth Night was called off.
“Ultimately, it’s a hockey tournament and it is hockey the way nature intended it," tournament spokesman Jim Dahlein told WCCO television, a year after warmer temperatures made for a rough ice surface on Nokomis. "At the end of the day, the ice conditions are paramount to the experience of everyone coming down here."
Wind chill advisories were issued for a broad swath of the Upper Midwest, where wind chill factors could dip to 40 to 50 degrees below zero (40 to 45 below zero, Celsius) in parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota and to 30 to 35 below (34 to 37 below, Celsius) in the Dakotas starting Thursday night.
Such wind chills, which describe the combined effect of wind and cold temperatures on exposed skin, could cause frostbite within minutes.
Forecasters say the frigid weather is expected to linger into next week, with even colder temperatures midweek.
The wind chill advisories cover "pretty much the entire Upper Midwest," stretching from the Dakotas into Kansas and east to Ohio, including northern Missouri, central Illinois and central Indiana, said meteorologist Bill Borghoff of the National Weather Service in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The deep freeze followed a cold front that pushed through Wednesday night into the Ohio Valley, he said.
Kenny Blumenfeld, senior climatologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' State Climatology Office, said winter cold snaps on average are an annual occurrence in Minnesota. But extreme cold happens only about once every three to five years, he said.
"It's Minnesota. We're supposed to go below zero and spend a lot of time not coming above zero. It's part of our winter," Blumenfeld said.