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With the week’s winter weather safely behind us, the Birmingham National Weather Service’s Meteorologist-in-Charge, Chris Darden, says that warmer weather lies ahead.

Darden told the Valley Times-News that the higher temperatures of Friday will continue into the weekend until early next week. By Tuesday, the highs will have rebounded back into the 40s and 50s with lows in the 20s and 30s.

Precipitation might make the roads slick Sunday night and Monday morning, but nothing so extreme as the hidden sheets of ice assailing unsuspecting drivers on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

Frosty may have melted but for many in the Valley area, the glacial freeze of the past few days brought up memories of former snow days.

Most recently, all of Alabama, but particularly the northern parts, faced a harsh week of winter in 2015. According to the NWS, some unofficial reports cited over 12 inches of snow along Highway 278 in Marion County due to the marriage of a cold front from the north and a northern gulf low bringing in precipitation.

However, the last winter storm of its kind to touch down in central Alabama would have been back in 1985, during which the temperature at the Birmingham Airport fell below freezing the evening of Jan. 19.

As the night drew on, the temperatures continued to plunge into the teens, falling to seven degrees by 9 a.m. on the 20th. The colds never moved past the single digits throughout the day. By nightfall, Birmingham was enduring a subzero arctic wind.

The lowest temperature recorded that night was six degrees below zero.

On the following day, the high was only 17 degrees. Chambers County’s older population will not soon forget the bitter chill of that January. 

Nearly ten years earlier, central Alabama was greeted with such freezing cold that it snowed all the way to Homestead, Florida, south of Miami.

According to the NWS, snow flurries were even recorded in the Bahamas that year.

The entire month of January was persistently cold in Birmingham with only five days in which the temperature reached 50 degrees or high. Whereas, the thermometer refused to climb above freezing on seven days of the month.

On 24 of the 31 days of January, the low temperature reached freezing or below, and on 14 of them, the low was in the teens and single digits.

That January in 1977, the coldest weather peaked on the 15th and lasted until the 20th. The temperature plateaued at or below freezing for 110 consecutive days, which was the second-longest such period in Birmingham’s recorded history.

The two lowest temperature days were the 17th and the 19th, “when the morning lows bottomed out at three degrees above zero,” according to the NWS.

In addition, the month’s average high temperature was 41.1 degrees, the average low temperature was 22.1 degrees, and the average daily temperature was 31.6 degrees.

This week’s storm, Darden said, was a combination of weather systems meeting up and leading to a unique reaction. First, the cold arctic air mass moving south out of Canada created very cold and very dry conditions.

Then, another system traveled across the northern Gulf of Mexico and spread moisture inland, which caused it to snow along the Gulf Coast.

The reason, Darden said, that central Alabama avoided the steeper inches of snow that the Mobile area got was because as the moisture spread northward, it lost momentum.