record
We saw it coming for days, but it still was a shock to feel the extreme cold after such a warm fall.

Many awoke to the double whammy of record snow, then the cold Sunday and Monday.

We saw several kinds of records fall across the area. Single day snowfall records were broken in Reno, Carson City, and Yerington just to name a few.

Most of the area saw a general 3 to 5 inches and that was historic for the date. We normally see our first snowfall around the middle of November, but what's so unusual is the amount that fell.


As a matter of fact, in Reno, we've only seen that much snow fall two other times in history before November 8th.

In our region, we have roughly 130 years of record keeping. So that's quite an accomplishment.


"To get that dramatic temperature change, and the amount of snow we did get is uncommon. We broke some single day snowfall records down in Yerington. They ended up with about 13 inches of snowfall at the Lyon County Sheriff's office out there," said NWS Reno Meteorologist Tony Fuentes

It's not just the record snow, but also the extreme cold. Several cold records were broken all across the area, both at night and during the day.

Just a few short days ago, we were talking about setting record high temperatures across the area.

For example, South Lake Tahoe recorded 71 degrees breaking the old record high. Compare that to Monday morning's bitter low of minus 1 degree which broke a record,

What a fluctuation in temperatures as many areas in the sierra dipped into the single digits this morning.

It's not just the overnight lows that were broken but also the daytime highs. For example, both Sunday and Monday highs struggled in the middle 30s. That's a solid 25 degrees below average and good enough for record cold highs!

"Previous record was 38 degrees. That's a long standing record. That was from 1920, about a 100 year record that was broken yesterday for the cold high temperature that we saw with it. So breaking that by 4 degrees is a pretty solid record that was broken," continued Fuentes.

Now that winter of 1920-21 saw above average snowfall for the first half of the winter then the second half turned dry.

But there isn't too much of a correlation to how early November snowfall predicts the rest of the winter, For now, the pattern stays active and cold for the next two weeks.