You may not have been awake to realize it, but Missoula set a new record high temperature for this date of 57 degrees, but the interesting part is that the record was actually set in the middle of the night, in fact at midnight on Monday morning.

The previous record high was 54, set in 1907.

Meteorologist Dan Zumpf with the National Weather Service Office in Missoula shared the information with KGVO News at about 3:00 a.m. on Monday.

“Once we got past midnight and were into Monday, it was 57 degrees,” said Zumpf. “We had already broken our record high temperature for the day just after midnight, if you can believe that, and actually that will probably stand as the high temperature today and we might see a repeat of this on Wednesday when we get another high pressure ridge going over us, so it’s really crazy for this late in the season.”

Zumpf said the high pressure system was widespread over a large portion of the western United States.

“Actually yesterday, all of Kalispell, Missoula and Butte all reached or broke their record high temperatures for the day,” he said. “So it's, it's pretty much all over the Western U.S. that we're seeing temperatures well above the seasonal average.”

Zumpf said western Montana will probably be seeing moderating temperatures over the next few days, but still much warmer than normal for early December.

“We're going to be seeing those high temperatures on Wednesday also challenging our records, but then by the weekend we should be seeing a cold front come through,” he said. “There's going to be some wind and there might also be some snow over the passes, but the snow for the valleys won’t come until early next week, as colder air moves down from Canada.”

Zumpf said colder and wetter systems are headed our way within the next seven to ten days.

“We're not talking full-on Arctic, so there’s no east wind, at least not as of yet,” he said. “But it's a developing scenario, definitely colder and definitely wet. So it's just all a matter of where the air mass is coming from. This one looks like it's more from the Gulf of Alaska, whereas the ones that really put us in the deep freeze are from the Arctic and the plains, so we're just seeing a slow turn in a week and I guess we'll see what happens between now and then.”

The forecast for Friday night’s playoff game with Eastern Washington calls for continued mild temperatures with a chance of rain, and Zumpf said the conditions will be fairly comfortable for fans inside Washington Grizzly Stadium.

 

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