![]() According to Krolak, the special mercury-thallium alloy thermometer would have been housed in a Cotton Region Shelter. The longitude and latitude coordinates supplied by the NWS places the site of the reading near where Average Joe’s Bar is on Main Street in Parshall today. There was no first name on the monthly reports, just a last name signature,” said Krolak. “Information on that site is very, very sketchy. The reading was taken by an NWS co-operative observer identified in NWS monthly reports only as Shubert. Perusing old records, Krolak was able to discover the longitude and latitude coordinates for Parshall’s co-op weather site where the record low temperature was recorded. Mercury-thallium alloy thermometers don’t freeze until the temperature reaches -78 Farenheit. The thermometer used to record the state’s all-time low was issued by the NWS and contained a mercury-thallium alloy such as those thermometers used in places where severe cold is common, like Siberia. It was originally speculated that the reading must have been made at a farmstead south of the city, but Krolak says evidence has come to light that the reading was made in Parshall proper. However, there were no such coordinates on Parshall’s monthly report for Feb. Information held by the NWS from that time period includes serial numbers of equipment and location of observations, usually by longitude and latitude. The 1976 account noted that Shubert was honored for 45 years of service as a weather observer and confirmed he was the man who took the -60 reading in 1936. In 1930 he volunteered to be a weather observer for the NWS. That’s what the station history said.”Īn August 1976 story in the Minot Daily News on Court Shubert says he arrived in Parshall on the first train to stop there in 1915. “This one was very, very sketchy,” said Krolak. ![]() He checked old NWS records and found the -60 reading on a hand-written sheet that a NWS co-op observer filled out and mailed to the Bismarck office at the end of February 1936. When asked a series of questions by the Minot Daily News, Krolak became intriqued as to how and where the -60 reading was recorded. Krolak is a meterological technician who directs co-operative weather observers and oversees data collection at the Bismarck bureau of the NWS. “It had to have been done with a special thermometer, liquid in glass, good to -69. “The -60 reading was taken right in Parshall,” said Krolak. However, says Richard Krolak of the National Weather Service in Bismarck, the -60 reading is accurate and remains a North Dakota record for frigid futility. Mercury thermometers, the most common of the day, couldn’t record such a reading because mercury becomes a solid at -37.89 degrees. That a thermometer even existed in Parshall to record such a low temperature is equally remarkable. 15, in 1936, that the temperature dropped to a ridiculously frigid and frighteningly cold minus 60 degrees on the Farenheit scale in downtown Parshall.
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