Our Climate Profile

Good afternoon from America. I will be starting on my new project, which will be called "Our Climate Profile" and it will be an ambitious attempt to document some of my own independent research on the climate. So far, I have gathered lots of extensive data on the climate only here in America, and especially my home state of Michigan. We are situated closer to the equator rather than the arctic (The North Pole). And we are on an altitude of between 700 and 800 feet, and surrounded on three sides by Great Lakes, making us just short of an island. That makes our continental climate have a rather major influence from another climate, one that's marine. And still, we have a pretty drastic weather swings, with the weather being able to change withing mere minutes. So, for the record; 2014 & '15 were most likely our coldest years ever, at least on record. Although there have been colder days in the past, once it got frigid the winter of 2014 to 2015, it stayed that way for just about all of winter, and every other day the temperatures seemed to dip into the subzeros. One day, the seventh of January 2014, was the most frigid time of my whole entire life. That's when the high was a mere eight degrees F. However, that day, unlike just about all of the rest of that winter, the air was still without any wind. Throughout the rest of winter (January and so on), the days never really got colder however. All of this was caused by the Polar Vortex. Although the highs were not getting much colder, there came a time sometime in February, when the coldest nighttime cold spell invaded Michigan. That's when the lower peninsula set a record low of -39 degrees F, while temperatures around my hometown, in Eaton County, dipped all of the way down to at least -20 degrees F (about -30 degrees C) at 3:00 am. Meanwhile, in other regions of the Midwest, the situation was far worse. For instance, near the Canadian border, temperatures dipped to -40 degrees F in January. The lows here in the US were considerably colder than the summertime highs were well, high; Usually, an intense heat wave over the US causes temps to rise about 25 degrees F above average. Yet here in the Midwest, the temps fell a staggering 50 degrees below average in several areas! I have always wondered about these weather anomalies...whether or not they were just here and now (if they were just a once upon a time occurrence), or if they would keep happening over the next many years. So, in order to figure all of this out, practically the only way to know for sure is to keep records around. In Mid March 2013, the temps were already into the mid 80's; the same kinds of temperatures that replaced the nighttime temperatures in August even before then! As for rapid temperature changes, I have not really noticed any during my life.
Now, towards the end of July (the 24th) of 2015, something truly remarkable happened. Snow!...in Colorado, that is. Still, that is extremely impressive. They are at a latitude much lower than Michigan.