Cleveland Opening Day Baseball History Updated

Since the middle of March, we've been watching the potential for some pretty serious cold for early April around Opening Day at Progressive Field.  There's been a lot of warming in the stratosphere over the north pole (warm colors below) which usually takes a couple of weeks under ideal circumstances to make its way down into the troposphere where weather directly impacts us. (Often times the stratosphere warming doesn't propagate down into the troposphere so the upper atmospheric warming remains, what we call, decoupled from the lower atmosphere. In those cases, little impact in the form of cold occurs.)

Warming at the top of the atmosphere creating cold at the surface seems counterintuitive but that warming and the stratosphere creates high pressure at the surface in the high latitudes.  Here is a primer from NOAA. There are many ingredients that have to be present for this to occur. Some originate in the tropics which make their way to the pole.

Where that change propagates south is typically where the cold sets up. In many instances, the long-range computer models have a difficult time ascertaining this.

Here is European Model each day from March 26 through April 1 showing temperatures for Tuesday afternoon April 8th (Opening Day in Cleveland). Notice it didn't pick up on the cold over the Great Lakes/Ohio Valley until March 29. Each day the cold became stronger and more pervasive across the northern half of the country.

Today (April 4), notice how extensive the cold is for April 8. The normal high is in the mid-50s for the second week of April. This translates to mid 30s!

850 mB temperatures (5000 ft level) drop to -12 to -14C. Good bet for some lake effect snow with accumulations late Monday into Tuesday.  It is late in the season so the lake water temperature is around 34 degrees Fahrenheit. You need a lake water temperature 850 MB temperature difference of at least 13°C  to start generating lake effect snow. So that difference is going to be pretty close to the cutoff.

We all remember Opening Day 2007. The game was cancelled then moved to Milwaukee. If that game were to be played in Cleveland, it would have been 28°

Technical weather aside, I did some research looking at all of the Opening Days for not only Cleveland Guardians history but ALL Cleveland professional baseball history going back to 1871 when they were called the Cleveland Forest Citys. This is when Cleveland professional baseball was in the National League. They were also known as the Cleveland Spiders and the Cleveland Blues.

Here is the complete list. It shows the year, date, either the game time temperature or the high temperature for the day depending on what was available (color coded), the result of the game and whether or not we had precipitation that day.

A few things to note: 

• There have been only seven games where we had game time temperatures in the 30s:

           1905, 1907, 1979, 1996, 2003, 2016 and 2019.

• The 2016 home opener was the coldest at 34°.

•  1899 opening day at League Park was the warmest. Game time temperature 84°.

• The most precipitation ever on opening day was 1981, April 11th at the old stadium. We had 1.44" of rain.

 

Most recently the 2006 opening day had 0.61" of rain. 

Opening day April 13th 1962 we had some scattered snow.