Guardians Opening Day weather history: Is it always this cold?
*Attached video: Weekend weather forecast
CLEVELAND (WJW) — Since the middle of March, we've been watching the potential for some pretty serious cold for early April around Opening Day at Progressive Field.
There's been a lot of warming in the stratosphere over the north pole (warm colors below), which usually takes a couple of weeks under ideal circumstances to make its way down into the troposphere, where weather directly impacts us.
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Warming at the top of the atmosphere, creating cold at the surface seems counterintuitive, but that warming and the stratosphere creates high pressure at the surface in the high latitudes.
Here is a primer from NOAA. There are many ingredients that have to be present for this to occur. Some originate in the tropics, which make their way to the pole.
Where that change propagates south is typically where the cold sets up. In many instances, the long-range computer models have a difficult time ascertaining this.
Below is the European Model, which is used each day from March 26 through April 1, showing temperatures for Tuesday afternoon, April 8, Opening Day in Cleveland.
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Notice it didn't pick up on the cold over the Great Lakes/Ohio Valley until March 29. Each day, the cold became stronger and more pervasive across the northern half of the country.
On April 4, notice how extensive the cold is for April 8. The normal high is in the mid-50s for the second week of April. This translates to mid-30s!
We all remember Opening Day 2007. The game was cancelled and then moved to Milwaukee. If that game were to be played in Cleveland, it would have been 28°
Technical weather aside, Meteorologist Scott Sabol did some research looking at all of the Opening Days for not only Cleveland Guardians history but ALL Cleveland professional baseball history going back to 1871 when they were called the Cleveland Forest Citys.
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This is when Cleveland professional baseball was in the National League. They were also known as the Cleveland Spiders and the Cleveland Blues.
Here is the complete list. It shows the year, date, either the game time temperature or the high temperature for the day, depending on what was available (color coded), the result of the game and whether or not we had precipitation that day.
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A few things to note:
There have been only seven games where we had game time temperatures in the 30s: 1905, 1907, 1979, 1996, 2003, 2016 and 2019.
The 2016 home opener was the coldest at 34°.
1899 opening day at League Park was the warmest. Game time temperature 84°.
The most precipitation ever on opening day was 1981, April 11th at the old stadium. We had 1.44″ of rain.
Most recently, the 2006 opening day had 0.61″ of rain.
Opening day on April 13, 1962, we had some scattered snow.
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The Guardians host the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday at Progressive Field for the sold-out affair. The temperature is forecast to be 39 degrees at first pitch, so it's on track to be one of the coldest home openers on record.
Pregame ceremonies start at 3:30 p.m., with the first pitch set for 4:10 p.m.
For more information and in-depth weather coverage, check out Meteorologist Scott Sabol's weather blog here.
Click here for today's forecast.
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