Chilly Winter Keeps Heating Costs High Coldest Span in Decades Offsets Falling Energy Prices

A check of heating degree day statistics for January shows the month was coldest month in 15 years -- since January 1994.

Factor in a colder-than-normal December, and the past two months were the coldest December-January combination since the winter of 1985-'86, according to National Weather Service data analyzed by We Energies.

Even with a balmy end to the month Saturday, when the temperature in Milwaukee climbed above freezing for the first time in more than three weeks, January was 20% colder than the January average over the past 20 years.

The past two months tied for the 13th-coldest December-January stretch since the 1890s, We Energies spokesman Brian Manthey said.

Net News Daily » Rare UK Snow Blizzard Brings Out the Twitter Mashups

The more fanciful but interesting Twitter mashup came from Ben Marsh who coded the #UKsnow Mashup, pictured. This is a Google map which maps reports of snow from UK Twitterers. They simply Tweeted the #UKsnow hashtag, the first half of their postcode and a score out of 10 for their local snow cover. The resulting map did what a billion-dollar weather satellite, hampered by cloud cover, couldn’t - actually portray a reasonably accurate picture of what was happening on the ground.