Weather maps from the night the Titanic sank

Unusually cold weather in April 1912 may have contributed to the unusually cold weather that plagued the Titanic as it went down that fateful night.

It was 113 years ago, on April 14, 1912, that the Titanic—widely considered unsinkable—struck an iceberg and plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Last year, in honor of the anniversary, AccuWeather explored a fascinating question: Could any of the surviving photographs be of the iceberg that sealed the ship’s fate?

My first reaction was probably the same as yours: Icebergs tend to look pretty similar. There were likely hundreds drifting in the North Atlantic that night—how could anyone possibly identify the exact one? But the article makes a surprisingly compelling case for one photo in particular.

Although the weather itself didn't contribute directly to the sinking of the Titanic, the low temperatures and ocean temperatures certainly contributed to the tragedy. in helping research this article, I've attempted to recreate some weather maps from that day, and there are some interesting stats. The color maps were created from the NOAA 20th Century Reanalysis (V3) data, which attempts to create data to present high-resolution, color graphics showing the daily weather from 1836-2015.

A little too calm?

The ship that night was under a particularly strong high-pressure system, which may have caused unusually calm seas that made the iceberg hard to see without ripples at the base (Washington Post). The weather map shown here shows this high-pressure system analyzed as a 1036 mb high (unusually strong but nowhere near record territory), as of the next morning (in all of these maps, I've placed a red "X" approximately where the tragedy occurred.

Some articles also state, unequivocally, that a mirage may have formed that caused the icebergs to be obscured. While that is also possible, and calm weather could lead to that, atmospheric optics is an extremely complicated field, so I can't say for sure. Here's what the pressure map would have looked like in a color analysis, from the NOAA data:

What was the actual weather during the sinking? We know it was cold. A cold front had passed through the day before, as you can see on the weather map at the top. Air temperatures were said to have fallen from the 50s in the morning to freezing just before it sank and water temperatures were near 28 degrees which is close to saltwater freezing temperature (WeatherWise Magazine). This map that I created from the NOAA Reanalysis shows the average temperature for the day (~40 F). This isn't super exciting since we already have the actual numbers I've just quoted.

But here's where it gets interesting. Check out the temperature anomaly map. Presumably, it would have had to have been unusually cold for the icebergs to be widespread and the water so cold at that location in April. The anomaly map for the day confirms that temperatures were below normal by as much as 8 K (14.4 F) compared to normal temperatures for the day.

More importantly, there's a 3 K (5.4 F) below normal area near the event, for the last 30 days, which tells the story why there were an unusual (but not unprecedented) number of icebergs and near-freezing saltwater conditions on the ship's route (that wouldn't normally be expected in April). I created the color maps myself with the NOAA Reanalysis tool. I haven't seen these particular weather maps for the Titanic sinking before, but these generally agree with the maps in this research paper which ran its own model for the night in question and has a much better and deeper analysis than I had time to do in this cursory look.