I do weather shows here at The Franklin Institute for school groups, and one show is about winter. Most of the students are in elementary school, and I always point out that they've yet to live through a truly cold winter around here. That's because, with the notable exception of the winter of 1995-96, most of the winters in recent memory have been relatively mild.

But some of the teachers and chaperones in the audience typically do remember a really cold winter, in fact, the coldest one on record for this area, the winter of 1976-77, exactly 25 years ago.

That winter, the temperature dropped to 10^oF or lower on 15 different nights - to put that in perspective, it's only been that cold five nights in the last five years! And the daylight hours were also cold that winter - a dozen times the high didn't get above 25^oF, something that's only happened seven times in the last five years.