Dear Tom,
I follow the national highest and lowest temperatures each day, but I have never seen Chicago listed. Has our city ever had the day’s highest or lowest temperature?
Chad Warren
Dear Chad,
Considering the unpleasantness involved with extreme temperatures, most Chicagoans would probably prefer never to see their city appear in the daily listing of the nation’s hottest or coldest places.
The National Weather Service began that daily tabulation 74 years ago, and Chicago’s name has never made the list.
On the very rare occasions when temperatures in our portion of the Midwest have been extreme enough to capture the daily title of national hottest or coldest, some other location within a few hundred miles of Chicago has invariably registered a more extreme reading than Chicago’s.
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Tom Skilling is chief meteorologist at WGN-TV. His forecasts can be seen Monday through Friday on WGN-TV News at noon and 9 p.m.
WGN-TV meteorologists Steve Kahn, Richard Koeneman and Paul Dailey plus weather producer Bill Snyder contribute to this page.
