Bundle up for the five coldest cities in America By Laura Bly, USA TODAY While relatively balmy conditions have prevailed across the USA the past few months, Old Man Winter is making a comeback - delighting skiers in snow-starved Lake Tahoe and elsewhere. And for travelers eager to put those longjohns and fleece parkas to a real test, researchers at The Weather Channel have crunched the latest 30-year average annual temperature data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center to come up with the five coldest cities in America. To keep the ranking from being dominated by one or two states, The Weather Channel picked the coldest locations in each state and took the top five from that list. Locations were limited to cities with at least 5,000 residents, with one major exception: Winner Barrow, Alaska, which boasts an average temperature of just 11.7 degrees. Other bone-chilling cities included International Falls, Minnesota (whose average annual temperature of 37.8 degrees and all-time record low of 55 degrees below zero have earned it the nicknames "Frostbite Falls" and "Icebox of the Nation"), Gunnison, Colorado (where travelers can expect freezes almost every day of the year), and Jackson, Wyoming. Rounding out the top five: Caribou, Maine, which gets more than nine feet of snow each year and whose average temperature of 39.7 degrees is partially due to a "polar vortex" over Hudson Bay, which funnels frigid air from Canada into northern Maine. |