Trinidad ex­pe­ri­enced a record-break­ing cold night when the min­i­mum tem­per­a­ture cooled to 18.3OC at Pi­ar­co dur­ing the pre-dawn hours of Jan­u­ary 30, 2023.

The cli­mate phe­nom­e­non was con­firmed in an of­fi­cial state­ment from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS).

“This was due to cold­er air from the north en­croach­ing on­to Trinidad and To­ba­go, where the winds were most­ly calm, with pre-ex­ist­ing very dry con­di­tions and al­most cloud-free skies for most of the night,” the Met Ser­vice state­ment ex­plained.  “This is the low­est tem­per­a­ture record­ed at Pi­ar­co for Jan­u­ary dur­ing the last decade, since 2012.”

Ac­cord­ing to the Met Ser­vice, the low­est min­i­mum tem­per­a­ture on record at Pi­ar­co is 16.1OC, which oc­curred on the nights of Jan­u­ary 21 and 30, 1964, fol­lowed by 16.4OC on the night of Jan­u­ary 28, 1976.

“Al­though there was a slow start to the cool sea­son in Trinidad and To­ba­go, the first half of Jan­u­ary had cool tem­per­a­tures in the mid to low­er 20s, even­tu­al­ly drop­ping to low 20s dur­ing the sec­ond half of Jan­u­ary and cul­mi­nat­ing dur­ing this last week with morn­ing tem­per­a­tures be­low 20OC,” the re­lease not­ed.

“There is a high prob­a­bil­i­ty that cool nights will con­tin­ue in­to the first week of Feb­ru­ary and pos­si­bly drop low­er than 18.3OC,” the Met Ser­vice pre­dicts.

It is ad­vis­ing in­di­vid­u­als who are sus­cep­ti­ble to low tem­per­a­tures and who ex­pe­ri­ence res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments “to be proac­tive at this time and wear warm and/or ex­tra cloth­ing, es­pe­cial­ly dur­ing this com­ing week.”

In its 2023 Dry Sea­son Rain­fall and Tem­per­a­ture Out­look, the Met Ser­vice had in­di­cat­ed:

“Few nights dur­ing Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary are like­ly to be rel­a­tive­ly cold with min­i­mum tem­per­a­tures falling be­low 20.0OC.”

It ex­plained that gen­er­al­ly, the cold­est night in any giv­en year in Trinidad and To­ba­go de­pends on in­di­vid­ual weath­er sys­tems present at the par­tic­u­lar time. How­ev­er, this is al­ways based on a sea­son­al cy­cle where on av­er­age for much of Trinidad and To­ba­go, the cold­est nights oc­cur dur­ing De­cem­ber to Feb­ru­ary, with Jan­u­ary tend­ing to be on av­er­age, cool­er than the oth­er months.

“On oc­ca­sions, the month of March has al­so pro­duced sub-20 min­i­mum tem­per­a­tures,” the Met Ser­vice ob­served.