Skating on frozen “ponds” in low spots in the field or standing atop snowdrifts as high as fence posts — do you have memories like these? They could date back to the 1960s and 1970s. Were winters colder then, or was it just because you were younger, and they seemed colder?

Look at the table of the longest streaks of consecutive days when the daily high did not exceed 32 degrees F, and you may determine that yes, it really was colder in decades like the ’60s and ’70s. That may be accurate if you are judging by these cold streaks, not considering winter-long daily highs or lows.

“NOAA has a weather streaks tool which makes it possible to sort out this type of information now,” explains Beth Hall, director of the Midwestern Regional Climate Cener.

Jacob Dolinger, operational climatologist at the MRCC, assembled the data you will find here on weather streaks. He used a tool called cli-MATE (MRCC’s Application Tools Environment).

What weather data shows

Hall makes the following observations based on the data Dolinger collected:

North to south in Indiana. Differences in Indiana’s climate from north to south show up dramatically when you look at both number of cold weather streaks and length of the streaks for northern weather stations like South Bend and Fort Wayne vs. Evansville. As expected, Indianapolis falls in the middle for number of streaks of below-freezing weather.

Freezing and below-freezing streaks. Most started in January. A few began in December. It is rare for such a streak to start in February, although it has happened. Some of the longest-recorded streaks began in late January.

Decades with more streaks. The 1950s didn’t include any streaks of 15 days or more at or below freezing at the four Indiana locations analyzed, but that changed dramatically in the 1960s. It picked up again in the late 1970s. The year 1978 not only featured the Blizzard of ’78 in late January, but also some record-setting streaks of freezing temperatures. The 1980s included some streaks, but they were less numerous in the 1990s. Some have occurred since then, however.

Multiple streaks per year. Surviving one stretch of below-freezing weather doesn’t mean you are home-free for the winter. Some winters feature more than one streak of 10 or more consecutive days of freezing temperatures. At Indianapolis in 1978, for example, there were three significant freezing streaks: Jan. 9-23, Jan. 26-Feb. 11, and Feb. 13-23. These three streaks alone accounted for 43 days at or below freezing that winter.

Cold winters at a glance

Here are facts and conclusions reached about cold streaks during Indiana winters since weather records were kept. Thanks to Dolinger for assembling the data used for these observations.

Dolinger used the Threshold Search function within MRCC’s cli-MATE tool to collect information from four key locations. He searched for streaks of consecutive days when the temperature did not climb above freezing at 32 degrees F.

Longest single streak at or below freezing:

Number of streaks of 10 days or more:

Number of streaks of 20 days or more below freezing:

Number of streaks of 30 or more days below freezing:

Month cold streaks started in, looking at the longest streaks, including ties:

Decades with most streaks of 15 days or longer since 1950: