Will The ‘Coldest New Jersey Day’ Record Be Broken This Winter?

I know it's a little early to talk about cold weather at the Jersey Shore, but if you're sipping pumpkin spice latte and you're talking about Halloween costumes for the kids, then you know it's pretty much right around the corner. So do we have any realistic shot of ever breaking the 'coldest day in New Jersey record? Could it happen this year.

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First, let's give you a minute to let the all time low record sink down deep into your mind for a couple of minutes. Here's some perspective for you. Our daytime temperatures are in the 60's and 70's this time of year.

So let's use the cold end of that range. Let's say it's 60 degrees at the Jersey Shore. That would still be almost 100 degrees away from New Jersey's record low temperature. And to be clear, the record is the temperature, and not a wind chill reading.

So, cue the drum roll here. The all time record low for New Jersey is an unbelievable -34 degrees, and it happened in the town of River Vale on January 5, 1904.

So, have we even come close around our area? Not really. We checked some Freehold stats.And while these numbers are pretty chilling (sorry), they are nowhere near the mark. The coldest January day in the history of Freehold was  -20 on February 9th of 1934 and a close second was -14 on January 28, 1935, according to the Office of the New Jersey State Climatologist.

But even the coldest cold in Freehold was a full 14 degrees off the record. And by the way, the more recent past has shown that we hardly ever go below 0 anymore, so the odds are pretty slim.

But you can't put anything past the extreme weather we always seem to be getting these days, so who knows. For the record, we are expecting an "extreme winter", so the stares are starting to align. Yikes.