For the first time in many years, I attended the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival, in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, over the weekend. An unusual cold snap had spread south into North Carolina, and snowflakes were observed in the Appalachian mountains. The festival was expected to be attended by 160,000 people, who were shivering in the wind that was blowing flags and balloons in the photo I took below:

According to the Wilkesboro Airport, temperatures during the fair were between 45 and 59 degrees, with winds that gusted as high as 24 mph. The wind chill fell to 40 degrees, and as I shivered I wondered, "Is this the coldest Apple Festival ever?" The short answer is yes, but no. Here are the stats for the last 20 years for the nearest official station:*

Coldest High Temperature: 2011 (59 F)Coldest Low Temperature: 2003 (36 F) - 2011 was ranked #3 Coldest Average Temperature: 1996 (50 F) - 2011 was ranked #2

One could argue that it was the coldest afternoon at the Apple Festival in the last 20 years, but the average temperature is more of a fair measure since the festival goes from dawn to dusk. By that stat, this Saturday was second only to 1996 - or the coldest festival in 15 years. I don't have records of wind handy, but it's likely that this festival felt like the coldest ever because the wind rarely gusts over 20 mph in the area. The average weather for last 20 years of the Brushy Mountain Apple Festival is a low of 49 and a high of 74; rain only fell twice, a "trace" in 2006 and a bit in 2001.

Something interesting to note is that 2003, which had the coldest low temperature, was the previous record year for earliest snowfall here in State College, Pennsylvania, but that was broken yesterday by one day. Penn State yesterday measured the earliest October, Fall and Seasonal snow fall (only a "trace") in their 115-year history. AccuWeather Meteorologist Henry Margusity captured the snow flakes yesterday morning just down the road from Penn State in the photo above. Further up in the county, there was significant snowfall (see below), and up to 9 inches fell in West Virginia!

*How did I do this (in any reasonable amount of time)? The first thing we have to do is figure out when the festival was in the past. According to WikiPedia, it's always the first Saturday in October. To calculate past occurrences, this page recommends pasting this formula into a spreadsheet:

=DATE(A1,10,1+((1-(C1>=WEEKDAY(DATE(A1,10,1))))*7)+(C1-WEEKDAY(DATE(A1,10,1))))

where cell A1 are years (type in 2011, 2010, then highlight both cells and drag downwards as far as you want -- in my case I'll go down to 1992 because that's as far as the internal database I have is using, even though the Apple Festival started in 1978 -- and C1 is "7" because that's the day number for "Saturday". (Change the "1" in the formula to "2" if you're looking for the second Saturday, etc.)

Next, I looked up the low, high, average temperature and precip for each date in AccuWeather.com Professional's quality-controlled "Past Weather" database for Hickory, NC (the closest station, as recommended by the website, that maintains more than 30 years of good weather records).

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