As the Chicago Bears game against the Cleveland Browns kicked off at noon at Soldier Field, the temperature was 8 degrees with a wind chill of minus 10, making it one of the coldest games in the team’s history.
“I think what’s making this so memorable is, the past few Decembers, and really the past few winters, have been so mild and with so little snow that this December is sort of like a slap in the face, to put it mildly,” said Brett Borchardt, senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Chicago.
But the temperature did not seem to dampen the Bears’ excitement in what has so far been a surprising winning season, a pattern they upheld Sunday with a 31-3 victory.
“We love this. This is Bear weather,” second-year quarterback Caleb Williams told his teammates before kickoff in a video posted to the team’s account on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s where we’re meant to be, it’s where we’re going to be for the rest of the year.”
Brrrrr down: The coldest Chicago Bears games played at Soldier Field
The temperature at kickoff was some 25 degrees below the normal average for this time of year in the area, according to weather service data. It warmed up to only 13 degrees around 3:30 p.m., toward the end of the game, compared with a normal daily high of 37 for mid-December.
Still, Sunday’s game was no Ice Bowl, when the Green Bay Packers played the Dallas Cowboys at 13 degrees below zero on Dec. 31, 1967 — the coldest NFL game ever.
But it was enough to keep many fans at home.
Last week, the cheapest tickets for the game were around $281, but prices dropped sharply after forecasts of plummeting temperatures began circulating online. Tickets were as low as $86 on Thursday, according to secondary ticket marketplace TickPick.
Gusts of 10-15 miles per hour and dangerous subzero wind chills started late Saturday and carried into Sunday. Wind chills as low as minus 20 to minus 28 degrees were recorded in the area overnight, including DeKalb, Waukegan, West Chicago, Wheeling and Valparaiso in Indiana.
According to the weather service, bitter temperatures Sunday morning were the coldest the Chicago area has had this early in the season since the “infamously” cold and snowy winter of 2013-14. A low of 2 below zero was recorded at O’Hare International Airport earlier in the day. The city was similarly cold on Dec. 10, 2013, at minus 6 degrees.
In addition to early blasts of cold, the Chicago area has already seen a lot of snow. The weather service has called this the snowiest start to winter in almost 50 years, since the 1978-79 season, which dropped a total of nearly 90 inches on the Chicago area.
At 17.3 inches as of Saturday, accumulation totals in Chicago this snow season — tracked from July through the following June — are quickly catching up to the 17.6 inches that fell during the entirety of last season. Still, meteorologists and climatologists say snow is tricky to forecast as it does not behave in simple ways.
It’s hard to establish a direct correlation between early snow activity yielding more snowfall over the course of winter and toward the end of the season. However, seasonal meteorological outlook reports have indicated a potential for a more active winter.
The current pattern of La Niña — a climate phenomenon of colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean expected to persist through most of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter — tends to plunge northern Illinois into colder-than-normal temperatures and create more storm systems moving through the Ohio Valley that can bring winter weather for much of Illinois.
Despite the snowy, cold start to this season, trends in recent decades point to an overall warming of average temperatures in winter as human activities like fossil-fuel burning release heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
That overall warming doesn’t rule out some occasional outliers, including bouts of extreme cold. And, as winters rapidly warm up, it doesn’t necessarily mean less snow — just like more snow than normal doesn’t necessarily mean winters aren’t warming up.
“It’s not unusual to have Decembers that start this cold and snowy. It happens a few times every decade. It’s just (that) the past few winters, Decembers have been so warm,” Borchardt said.
Things are looking up for the rest of the month, however, as temperatures are forecast to warm up a little — though “it’s not going to be 75 and sunny,” he cautioned.
